What is life?

I'm watching the video series 'The Origin of Life' by Robert Hazen, and have a few comments to make on the third lecture.

Quotes and comments;

A. 'One of my favorite books on OOL studies is 'Biogenesis' by Nathan Lahav. In the book Lahav gives 48 different definitions of life... and none of them agree. [1.]

The list could be expanded many times I'm sure.
- Isn't it possible that the reason they can't figure out how 'life' could spontaneously occur is because life doesn't exist, that it's an abstraction? In the creationist view, life doesn't exist, but rather particular living organisms exist. Since none of them could have spontaneously occurred, this means they they had to have an intelligent source. [2.]

B. Hazen says many OOL people think (imagine) the first life on earth was nothing like what we have today.

- Well; that makes their theories hard to refute doesn't it? How could you refute any of these stories?

C. Most OOL 'workers' imagine the first life did not incorporate DNA, he tells us.

- We can see that as an admission DNA could not have spontaneously arisen.

D. The first life form may not even have used protein he says.

- Again; this is impossible to refute... and an admission proteins couldn't have spontaneously arisen.

E. The first life form must have arisen from chemical reactions he says.

- I see nothing in chemicals that predicts life forms and genetic code.

F. He ends up falling back on the old strategy of claiming the distinction between life and non-life is a false dichotomy.

- This is a way of doing away with the need to account for the origin of life; but it ends up requiring a belief in panpsychism.

G. His whole theory depends upon making the seemingly impossible possible by breaking it down into a great many minute steps. (This is the model Charles Darwin used with biology.)

- It seems to me that m.s are trying to solve the problem by breaking it down into so many 'steps' as to make each one seem possible... and thus make the whole chain of (supposed) events possible.

H. He talks about chemical evolution before life forms arose; but this term strikes me as an oxymoron or an equivocation. i.e. evolution as normally understood requires reproduction.

I. Most of this imagined history (of the early earth) is lost he tells us.

- And how are we going to refute that? I thought Hazen told us science has to be observable in his 'Joy of Science' series. If all this 'history' was never observed and is lost, how can we possibly know if the stories OOL people tell us are true. [3.]

J. The evidence that OOL people need to give a materialist account of creation all disappeared he tells us.

- Well, maybe; but it seems a tad convenient. This then, is the flimsy foundation on which modern evolutionary theory is built. ie. a house without a foundation... a house with a foundation that was eaten away and has disappeared... in other words, an invisible foundation, a foundation of theory.

K. There's no place to draw a line in this series of steps where non-life becomes life he tells us. (He earlier drew parallels to debates as to when human life begins in the womb, and to when a person is really dead.)

- This model of origins ignores the real question in my opinion; which is where did the information we see in living forms come from? His model requires (it seems to me) that this information was somehow 'hidden' in inert matter. I see no evidence this is true.
- This particular defense of spontaneous emergence is largely a matter of rhetoric. (It's an old game; played by the ancient Greeks. e.g. there's no absolute border between justice and injustice, etc.) We can present the matter more simply however. We can ask is a human being alive? is a rock dead? the answers seem pretty obvious to most of us. Is there a difference between crystal and DNA? He's playing games here; trying to avoid problems for his theory by confusing the issue.

L. He ends up telling us the question what is life is merely a matter of semantics. (I kid you not.) I guess that means something is alive if someone says it is. I guess all we have to do to find life on Mars is to define some thing or other on the planet as alive.

Notes;
1. The Origin of Life - Robert Hazen (Teaching Company) lecture #3. What is Life?
- I'm paraphrasing Hazen, not giving exact quotes.
2. This doesn't mean that all organisms now extant on earth were directly created, but that they are descendents of organisms that were directly created.
3. Hazen ends his lecture by saying 'science is based on observations of the living world.' (Was he listening to himself when he said this :=)
3. Aren't OOL studies a waste of time? Aren't they an exercise in myth making?
4. The definition of life adopted by NASA has 3 components; a. life must be a chemical system; b. must be self sustaining (gathering energy and atoms from its surroundings; i.e. metabolism); c. all living things must display some sort of variation (sometimes referred to as being able to undergo Darwinian evolution)
- we have no universal definition of life he says..
5. What is life? In the bible we read that Christ is life. (i.e. this isn't a what question, but a who question.)