
… we are sure it must be a fully natural event that just sort of happened. Or else a fully natural event that just had to happen. Right after the Big Bang, if that’s the time frame needed.
The definition of life has reached the point where science historian George Dyson tells us, “Life is whatever you define it to be.” Richard Dawkins has suggested it is “anything highly statistically improbable, but in a particular direction.” And at a year 2000 international “What is life?” conference, no two definitions were the same.
Biochemist Edward Trifonov noted that there are 123 definitions available and, undeterred, promptly proposed his own: Life is self-reproduction with variations. Which was just as promptly contested. In a 2012 issue of philosophy journal Synthèse, Edouard Machery concluded that “scientists, philosophers, and ethicists should discard the project of defining life.”
Still in the game, astrobiologist Charley Lineweaver proposes a new, non-Darwinian approach to defining life: More.
See also: Is there a good reason to believe that life’s origin must be a fully natural event?
We are trying to do far too many things at once with these definitions. Life doesn’t have to evolve to be life, for the simple reason that “liveness” is determined on a timescale of seconds to minutes (or possibly hours), whereas evolution is defined on a timescale of millennia to aeons.
I think intuitively we can tell the difference between a live dog and and a dead one pretty easily, or the difference between a live spider and a rubber one. In fact, we need to make this distinction pretty rapidly just to survive and swat mosquitos, for example.
So no, this is difficulty with defining life isn’t really a semantic or comprehension difficulty, its a philosophical difficulty. It gets in the way of promoting Darwinism, OOL, and abortion, for example. And that’s what all the contortions are about–attempts to find definitions that promote all one’s favorite philosphies and detract from one’s enemies. The best definition of all is “Life is what I say it is and not what everyone else falsely claims.”
Now that we’ve settled this definition, can we get on with the question of how OOL occurred and perhaps when?
So biologists don’t know what they are studying?
The absolute presumption that those blind jackanapes should try to include the subtlest works of the spirit of God within their gross and pedantic study, made all the more clumsy as a result of their ‘a priori’ prejudice against the more subtle truths of the non-material world, beggars belief. Utterly disgusting.
Living organism:
1- Must contain a genome (Yockey)
2- Must be able to reproduce or have come from reproduction
3- Response to stimuli (yes plants respond to stimuli)
4- metabolism
5- Growth
6- composed of one or more cells
7- adaptation
8- homeostasis
Funny that Darwinists look for life in a Theory that is infused with killing and death. Natural Selection supposedly creates by killing off the weak and unfit. Random mutations, which are falsely appealed to as a great creative engine that knows no bounds are, in reality, at the bottom of thousands of genetic disorders, diseases, and even, ultimately our own personal aging and death.
This following video brings the point personally home to us about the effects of genetic entropy:
If Darwinists really want a definition for life that actually works, why don’t they ask the one who overcame death? He just might have a clue!
Notes:
I suggest, if scientists want to find the source for the supernatural, ‘Quantum’, light which made the “3D – photographic negative” image on the Shroud, then they should look to the thousands of documented Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) in Judeo-Christian cultures. It is in their testimonies that you will find mention of an indescribably bright ‘Light’ or ‘Being of Light’ who is always described as being of a much brighter intensity of light than the people had ever seen before.
Of note to the integrity of NDE testimonies;
Even though the atheistic researchers in this following study found evidence directly contradicting what they had expected to find for Near Death Experiences, they were/are so wedded to the materialistic/naturalistic view of reality, the view of “I’ am my body”, that it seems sadly impossible for them to even conceive of the fact that they may be wrong in their naturalistic presuppositions, and to even admit to the possibility of the reality/truth of the soul, i.e. to the “I’ am a soul distinct from my body” view of reality.
Verse and Music:
Robert Sheldon: “Life doesn’t have to evolve to be life . . .”
Exactly. Anyone who defines life in terms of evolution is guilty of circular reasoning and their definition can immediately be ignored as faulty.