Playing with the building blocks of life

- If you read the popular science magazines, and especially any stories about Origins, you'll have come across the phrase the 'building blocks of life'. I find it odd that in an age where people have discovered the incredible (bottomless) complexity of the cell we still have materialists using this phrase.

It's a product of a bygone age; an age that imagined 'life' was a very simple thing, and that imagined the first primordial cell consisted of something akin to a blob of jello. The phrase conjures up an image of workmen using bricks to build a house or school. In this scenario life was a matter of rearranging the the inert matter of an early earth until one came upon the right arrangement.

The phrase 'building blocks' also conjures up an image of a child's set of toy blocks.
The problem for any materialist, or for anyone who doesn't want to accept any kind of creation for the origin of living forms on this planet, is that 'life' is most certainly not a simple matter.

To get a picture of how serious the problem is for the materialist we might image a child playing with some blocks. The blocks are brightly colored, but because he comes from a poor family, they have no letters stamped onto them. How long do you think it will take the child to spell out a message with the blocks? Let's give him a message he needs to spell out, as a metaphor for the origin of life. Let's say he has to spell out the message, ''Me thinks Richard Dawkins is a weasel.'' (Or; ''Look mommy, I've created life." How long is it going to take him?

Summary;
Since the materialist has no access to intelligence (or information) this is the true picture of the materialist dilemma. Some people (not yours truly) might be tempted to call this a blockhead cosmology. (Do the molecular machines involved in producing ATP look like toy blocks to anyone? Do they look like they were made from blocks?)

You wonder why materialists keep using this phrase. Is it because they want people to think the whole OOL issue is a simple one; that it's really no problem for the materialist scenario? (They need to put out a new edition of Darwin's phrase book; the one they're using is badly out of date.) The discoveries of cellular biology have carved an obituary in the tombstone of materialism.

If we can be allowed a little rhetorical flourish, we might say that the laws of physics are a prison from which life cannot escape. It takes an intelligence transcending the merely physical to provide the information that will allow a living organism to be created.

The scrabble of [OOL] speculation hasn't produced any believable stories on how matter can transcend itself, on how it can pull itself up by its own bootstraps. The rather obvious fact is that matter is content to be matter; that it has no capacity to be anything else. (A situation we should be grateful for. Imagine working a painting if the canvas had a mind and will of its own; imagine working on a sculpture if the stone had its own ideas on transformation :=)

Building blocks without a plan (blueprint) are useless. Can bricks 'self-organize' into a building?

Hurling a few thunderbolts around isn't going to help this Cyclopean project get off the ground. Stones remain stones, and no living forms emerge to climb the walls of this dark and hopeless prison. Not only is Materialism a one-eyed view of the universe, it's a view grown blind. You can cobble together stones to build a prison, but the walls won't breathe, reproduce or live.

From a philosophical view [i.e. linguistic analysis] the phrase building block is meaningless unless we assume a builder. Without a builder all you have are blocks.

Notes;
1. Blocks;
- Children's wooden building toys, attested by 1885, from block (n.).
- 1693: Alphabet Nursery Blocks were originally developed in 17th century England. The philosopher John Locke, in 1693, made the statement that "dice and playthings, with letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing" would make learning to read a more enjoyable experience. - Wiki
- 1798: Witold Rybczynski has found that the earliest mention of building bricks for children appears in Maria and R.L. Edgeworth's Practical Education (1798). Called "rational toys," blocks were intended to teach children about gravity and physics, as well as spatial relationships that allow them to see how many different parts become a whole. - Wiki