Does Death Pose Challenge To Abiogenesis

Hi, Buzsaw. This is what I wrote: Here it is in "unambiguous syntax": Clear?----- Of course you're misreading me: when have you ever read me correctly?You missed the keyword: "thesis," meaning "the central concept of a piece of writing" (it's a grammar term: not your strong suit, I know).You invoked SLoT, saying that simpler forms should be more heavily affected by increasing entropy than advanced forms. That is your thesis.I showed you an example of an extremely simple system that readily and repeatedly decreases in entropy, which is a direct refutation of the central principle of your argument. Now, you have to support your thesis, or your entire argument fails.Understand?-----Your posts since than have only been disingenuous ploys to score cheap rhetorical points with semantic arguments bereft of substance.Stop arguing with words and argue with some content.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

CedreWhy do you have to go all the way back to abiogenesis? And exactly where do you draw the line indicating the end of abiogenesis?All the "parts", as you put it, that were necessary for MY life to start were present at the moment of my conception and during my development in my mother's womb.Does that mean that if I die and cannot be resuscitated, it proves that my gestation never took place?

Hi, Cedre. But the "carbon compounds" are not still in the right positions!Have you ever noticed how our bodies degrade slowly before we die of old age? This is because things are breaking down:

• muscles are losing their strength due to failures of chemical pathways to provide the right molecules in the right places at the right times.
• Bones become more and more brittle as the chemical pathways used to produce mineralized matrices fail.
• Brain cell connections degrade, so that electrical synapses can no longer be sent between them, resulting in neurological disorders such as dementia.
• Telomeres degrade, allowing genes inward of the telomeres to begin degrading, causing their molecular products to be synthesized incorrectly, so their functions are not performed correctly.

What about when someone dies a traumatic death?

• Lacerations cause massive blood loss, and the loss of blood makes the body inable to put oxygen in the correct place at the correct time, so that energetic reactions in the body cannot happen.
• Traumatic injuries to vital organs can cause muscles to desynchronize their movements(fibrillate), resulting in poor performance of the lungs, heart, diaphragm, etc., which can reduce bloodflow or oxygen transport and also cause death.
• Traumatic injuries to the brain can disrupt synaptic pathways and cause important functions in the body from occurring.

You will never, ever find a situation in which a perfectly-functioning body just dies for absolutely no reason. There is always a cause of death, and, by definition, a "cause of death" is something that makes the body stop functioning correctly.This idea that, at the moment of death, all the parts are in the right place is completely and unbelievably false. I wish creationists would stop trying to bring it up.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

As noted a number of times, Cedre, the life or death of a large, multicellular organism has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of simpler-than-we-have-now single celled (or not even with cells as we know) living things.Stick to bacteria which is closer to relevant. Humans and cats are not.

And tell us if bacteria have "spirits."

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

CedreLet’s try another analogy to demonstrate how and why you are talking about completely different processes and there is no logic to your argument.ANALOGY - STALACTITESThese are mineral deposit formations that hang from the ceilings of caves.They require the presence of limestone and water to form.However, they do NOT form wherever limestone and water happen to be present. It requires a particular set of circumstances and processes to occur.It requires the water to run through the limestone rock and pick up minerals from that rock. It then requires the water to drip from the ceiling of a cave and leave a deposit of the minerals at the point of the drip. The water must continue to drip from this exact point over a long period of time for an obvious stalactite to form.If that stalactite falls from the roof of a cave and smashes into the ground, breaking into many pieces, even though all the same parts that formed the stalactite are still present, they will not immediately reform to make the stalactite. It would require a complex and maybe impossible set of processes to reform that same stalactite using the same parts. If it proves to be impossible to re-assemble the stalactite and fix it back on the roof of the cave, that does not disprove the long and gradual process that formed the stalactite in the first place — because that was a completely different process!

Which all just goes to show that life and death are not the absolute categorie you'd like them to be so you can talk about the prescence or absence of 'spirit'. What's being demonstrated by brain-dead people on lifem support is that we can keep the metabolism of many of the body's cells going by using artificial means to keep them supplied with oxygen and nutrients, even when the brain is irreprably damaged and the body is incapable of doing this by itself.If we turned off the machines, the body would stop working. How is this a sign of a spirit? It suggests the obvious explanation that the machines maintaining function are what is preventing these cells from dying. The brain cells, meanwhile, are still dead. Why doesn't the spirit magic them back into action, if it's there in the body?And regarding the bacteria and yeast lying dormant in the examples I mentioned in message 40, why did the spirit animating them bugger off for millions of years and return only when scientists intervened to revive the cells?

It seems that from Cedre's definition, the machines would be putting the life spirit into the brain dead body.
Extrapolating from that, it would seem that in Cedre's world, machines are a god.

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

Even when a person or organism dies, so long as it has reproduced or replicated itself its life goes on in the offspring. So the life is still not dead even when the individual ceases to be.I think the stumbling block for you is that you're thinking on to grand a scale. A human is made up of an organized collection of cells, that form organs, that in turn form the individual person. Each cell of our body is alive in it's own right. You're confusing the life of a complex collection of cells (complex organisms) with the life in a single cell.

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"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts." -Albert Einstein"I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief."
~ Gerry Spence

Dead things don't have all the required elements of life, otherwise they wouldn't be dead.

Actually you didn't show that. You are making the claim based on a superficial, and if I may say, erroneous, definition of "components". As Rahvin and others have pointed out, the electrochemical nature of the body's control systems renders incorrect your intuitive sense that everything necessary for life is still present in a dead body. Death typically occurs because of the loss of energy to the brain. This energy is not unreal, or mysterious, or magical. It is real, measurable, "stuff".The fact that you can't see it, perhaps don't know about it, and clearly are not including it in your intuitive inventory of what is and is not present in a newly dead body, does not lend support to your assertions.The newly dead brain is not chemically the same as a living brain, and has not been chemically intact for some period of time before we would recognize death as having occurred. You are hoist on your own metaphorical petard here. If the battery in that car had lost its electrochemical charge, the car would be immobilized. To the casual observer (the status, sadly, which describes your understanding of death in the physiologic sense.) it would appear that all the components necessary for mechanical life were present - even if one were astute enough to do a visual inspection of the fluid level in the battery. But the car, nonetheless, would be dead. Not because it had lost its "spirit", but because a set of ions, unmeasurable without the appropriate technology, were no longer in their appropriate location.With time, the metal parts would rust, the electronics corrode, the plastic become brittle. To even the casual observer it would then be clear that the car was dead. But the not-so-apparent cause of death would still have been real and physical. That it was based in a level of chemical interaction not visible to the eye, or accessible to the untrained mind, does not for a moment render it other than physical. Only if the function of the brain is being performed by something else. This fails to address or support your claims, and seems, in fact, to undermine them.Capt.

Cedre: But it IS puerile junk! The driver is utterly irrelevant to the analogy/argument...I’ll return to that shortly. But the issue of the driver being needed is junk. So, your car is parked at the top of a hill. Handbrake left off but the car is on the level on the top and is not moving. A sudden earth-tremor judders the car - it rolls slightly forward onto the slope and sets off merrily down the hill....voila - speed and no driver. Are all creationists so unimaginative in their thought processes that simple scenarios like this don't come to their mind?But I have only brought up the above to show you that your assertion isn't even correct. However, on a more fundamental basis, your assertion about a driver is utterly irrelevant to the issue - which is that correct organisation of matter will cause an emergent property (i.e. organise matter into a car and 'speed' emerges which was never part of the component build).The issue of the driver is irrelevant. You can put a driver in a pile of oil, metal lumps, petrol and rubber/plastic, and no matter how much that driver tries he can't make that heap of matter move and have 'speed' - the emergent property cannot exist until the structure is in it's required form.You remind me of an 8 year old boy who once said to me that modern man is not a 'meat-eater' because we (as in the majority of us) don't go out and chase and club animals to death prior to eating them (he'd seen a film on the assumed habits of our early ancestors). Amused, I asked him why we modern people don't count as meat-eating animals anymore and he said "Because we have butchers to cut up our meat now".Do you see the irrelevance? To him a meat-eater has to kill his own animals first, whereas we know that the true definition is simply one who consumes meat - the method of its procurement is irrelevant. And that is exactly what you have done with this insistence of a driver. The issue is: emergent properties as a result of organisational ordering.It is excusable in the case of the 8 year old who won't have reached Piaget's level 4 reasoning. With you it is inexcusable! Cognitive Development - Overview Of Cognitive Development, Piaget's Theory Of Cognitive Development, Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory - Children, Object, Infant, and Display - JRank Articles To carry your insistence on this point means one of two possibilities:1. You are genuinely not advanced mentally to Piaget level 4 abstract thinking (that is not a sneer; many adults in fact struggle to attain the highest level 4 sublevel). If this is the case for you, we will be unable to make you follow abstract thought challenges.2. You realise where the argument is going and know you are going down in flames, and are seeking to be pedantic and cling to any line of argument to prevent the logical end process being followed - in which case we are 'pissing in the wind with you'.Did you even read the rest of my post Message 116 or did you stop after the 'driver of the car' bit at the top and thought you had 'victory by default'?If so, it was a pyrrhic victory!

I have given you evidence that they are, I have provided several links which maintain that tissue breakdown happens in stages and this stages happen over hours. And if tissue hasn't began to breakdown it means that the cells and their components that comprise the tissue haven't either thus the carbon compounds comprising the cells and their components are in position, the only time they are not in position must be when the tissue begins to breakdown. According to the above link These cells survive because they use a different type of respiration than when the heart and lungs were working. While the person was alive the cells used aerobic respiration (with oxygen), but after death the cells continue to survive using what is called anaerobic respiration (without oxygen).Therefore you claim that the carbon-compounds required for life are not in place after death is unfounded. My argument is not about functionality its about the fact that despite having all the required parts for life organisms can die. Meaning that carbon-compounds are not the only ingredients needed for life. Firstly I didn't borrow these from any creationist. Secondly your idea that parts are not in the right place is false as I showed above.Edited by Cedre, : No reason given.Edited by Cedre, : No reason given.Edited by Cedre, : No reason given.

I do not believe in abiogenesis, exisiting scientific knowledge doesn't prompt me to accept that life can come about spontaneously, but I also reject the idea due to the fact that death poses a challenge to abiogenesis in that it demonstrates that parts are not all that is required for life to begin, a life-force seems needed. Because of this I cannot hypothecate anything about the end of abiogeneis as I do not even believe it does happen.

I already addressed simple life forms in my response to Meldinoor.