Archived Articles
Question of Life
Under the topic of “Things Unseen” we described life as being in the realm of the unseen. Furthermore, when we applied a simple derivation of the formula of Moore’s law to evolution and the origins of life we found that life could have preexisted the 4.5 billion year old earth, something that is difficult to accept.
Yet even the most simple of today’s creatures recognize when life is present and when it is not. And science has been able to trace life’s evolution from its earliest forms to today’s more complex forms. But how did life begin here on earth? Evolutionists believe that we have completely originated from randomness in which something exploded billions of years ago into an unknown. Thus, they believe not only in evolution or change over time, but that we spontaneously arose from basic elements. A problem arising from this is, why hasn’t this spontaneity continued? Life forms only evolve from pre-existing life forms and not from basic elements. Evolution does not explain how life first appeared on earth. An example given is from an article by John Rennie published in 2002 in Scientific America as a rebuttal against creationism. The article admits that evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth, that the origin of life remains very much a mystery.[1]
Andy Knol who is a professor of biology at Harvard and author of “Life on a Young Planet” also confirms this. He is quoted on a Nova program as saying, “The particulars of the jump from nonliving to living that occurred sometime in our planet’s early history is a profound enigma and will likely remain that way for some time to come.” “The short answer is we don’t really know how life originated on this planet.”
But what exactly is life? The fact is that there is no universally accepted definition of life. We Don’t Know! How then do we define life? That depends on whom you ask. Dr. Ghadiri [2] says for something to be considered life it must satisfy these three conditions:
1. It is self-replicating
2. It is self-sustaining
3. It is capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution
An article in the magazine USA Today[3] by Seth Borenstein titled “Scientists struggle to define life” states “Philosophers wrestling with the big questions of life are no longer alone. Now scientists are struggling to define life as they manipulate it, look for it on other planets, and even create it in test tubes.”
David Deamer, a University of California, Santa Cruz biochemist says, ” It's best to describe it, not define it.”
Carl Pilcher, director at NASA's Astrobiology Institute in California, says, “ It's far easier to say what life isn't.”
Can we say then that we recognize when life is present by what it does as opposed to what it is? Watch for more to come.
“And it is in no way possible for anything to be responsible for its own generation and decay. For the mover must preexist the moved, and the begetter the begotten. But nothing is prior to itself”. —Aristotle
