The stuff of life

Carl Sagan once claimed that we could make the 'stuff of life' quite easily in the lab. [1.] He was playing word games. There is no such thing as the stuff of life, for the simple reason life is not a thing. Life is an abstraction taken from the study of living organisms.

As an example of how meaningless his comment is; it would be as accurate to go to the beach, point to the sand, and say, 'here is the stuff of computers'. (The materials of which something is made say little about the entity itself; sometimes hardly anything.)

Matter might be the 'stuff' of life, but only in the sense oil is the stuff of a painting. Expecting mere matter to transform itself into a living organism is like expecting a palette, a brush, and a canvas to transform themselves into a painting.

He deliberately mislead the untold millions who watched his famous TV series. The reductionist model he showed is a complete failure. Without intelligent design, mere matter is forever dead. (Chemicals unceasingly obeying the laws of physics.) Matter only 'comes alive' as the result of intelligence input.

Notes;
1. "The stuff of life, it turns out, can very easily be made..." [Quoted in 'Alive' by Magnus Verbrugge/p.227]
- the quote is from Sagan's book Cosmos.
2. Sagan was well aware that origin of life experiments couldn't produce the miracle he claimed they could.