Does Death Pose Challenge To Abiogenesis

Biochemists have long agreed that life doesn't spring from chemicals in one single short step. Our understanding of such things seems to indicate that a fairly lengthy process is required. You might have all the ingredients for cake - but you need to mix them right and then heat them in an oven.The problem is that in our current environment everytime the cake mix is put in the oven, some kids come along and eat the cake mix so we are unlikely to get cake. That is to say: when we put the chemicals together, they are consumed by bacteria and fungi etc. No. If it had all the parts in place needed for life, it would be alive. The fact that it is dead shows that all the parts are not in place. Can you find a contra-example to support your position? Dead people are brought back to life on a fairly regular basis by removing the cause of death.
The problem comes if they have been dead for a certain amount of time: Then decay would have kicked in and we currently have no way of taking care of this damage. Even if we cure what killed them - there is still something ensuring they are dead.

I've never said that people can be brought back everytime. This is because for whatever reason it is not possible to remove the cause of death, or restore the body back to a functional condition.Michael Jackson did not have all the requried parts for life in tact. That's why he died. It is your claim that a dead person is functionally equivalent to a living person in every single way. I don't see why this has to be so. It might be, but I've heard of no case where this is true. You claimed that it was so, I'm asking for you to back this up. If you aren't able to, I see no reason to believe your claim that 'something else' is require for life. Nice quote mine. The thing that is ensuring they are dead is decay, as I subsequently explained. Really? So the brain cells of a person deprived of oxygen for ten minutes are identical to the brain cells of a healthy living person and an autopsy would be unable to determine that deprivation of oxygen had occurred? No difference in pH levels? No difference in Calcium distributiion?You should probably publish your results since forensic pathology has been getting things very wrong - people have gone to prison on the back of this kind of grotesque error. Justice must be served - stop debating on this pesky and pointless debate board - you clearly have a greater calling.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

The coronor's report provides the information. I haven't read it, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't read: This body is perfectly healthy and functional. I'd imagine it would mention something about the presence of propofol, about oxygen starvation etc. While there is nothing 'missing', the parts are not arranged in the same way. Agreed? The brain hasn't vanished - but the cells are no longer the same as a living brain - even after a mere few minutes. Agreed?

LOL - Equivocation isn't going to help you here. Being dead, as any doctor will tell you - is not 'healthy'. CNN were probably reporting that he had no specific illness immediately prior to his dying.Do you have any evidence that his brain cells were exactly the same after his death as they were before? Or indeed - that this is the case for any person? My point exactly.
So, after thirty minutes or five minutes or whatever short period of time you want to mention - are you suggesting that the brain cells of the poor person who has been starved of oxygen are exactly identical to that of a person who is still living?It seems to me that your position is that doctors don't reverse the damage caused by whatever and that they don't simply restart bodily processes that were somehow interrupted, but instead they re-insert the 'spirit'. My position is that if you do the same procedure to the same patient just a few minutes later it won't work despite it having all the same organs because the brain cells will have already begun to break down and things such as pH balance and calcium levels will be sufficiently different so as to prevent resuscitation.

You should read the full argument,then. The argument is that there is reason to believe there is some 'essential force' a 'spark of life' or 'spirit' that animates life and that without it - the body is dead. This is meant to prove abiogenesis wrong because this spirit is needed for life to exist and that for some reason this 'spark of life' cannot conjoin with certain arrangements of chemicals without some intervention.The support for this is that a dead body is physically identical in every way to a living one. My argument is that this is not so, so the support fails on these grounds.So how have I constructed a strawman?

But...why should doctors need to intervene? If the dead body is identical to the living one - why do doctors need to make changes to the dead body in order that it come back to life?

Yes - but it requires intelligent intervention to bring it back to life. The reason is because something has stopped working properly not because everything is the same but for a missing soul. My body remains alive without a soul. If bodies often spontaneously came back to life - that would be an argument for the soul. The fact that whatever is wrong with the body has to be fixed and processes started up again before life returns is not evidence for a requirement for a soul for life to start at all.Besides - this only weakens theories that propose that if you put the right chemicals in vague proximity to one another life will immediately form. Of course - nobody has ever seriously proposed that this is the case except for creationists. But I started discussing that and Cedre warned that it was a strawman of his argument so I turned to focus on his argument for the existence of a spark of life.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

I asked earlier, but you seem to have moved on to other things: Why is resuscitation even required? If the physical body has all the right parts in all the right places for it to be alive...why does someone need to come along and rearrange the parts, add more energy, supply new chemicals etc before it will come back to life?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

I think you'll probably find that Cedre's position is something along the lines of "God is the source of life and God is eternal and living. Life does not come from non-living materials, but from God." Cedre would argue that without a God that gives the life spirit to non-living matter, there would be no life.

That doesn't follow at all. Just because there isn't a single agreed upon hypothesis fora)how life might be able to originate
b)how life on earth did originatedoesn't mean that there are no such hypothesese that are falsifiable.

Sure.Let's say you postulate that "complex organic molecules arose gradually on a pre-existing, non-organic replication platform such as silicate crystals in solution" (paraphrased from the wiki article) - you could falsify this concept quite tidily by showing that crystals "are not faithful enough to store and transfer information from one generation to the next" (again paraphrased from wiki).As for whether or not it is more 'falsifiable' than the genesis account, isn't something worth getting into. I never claimed that the one account was more falsifiable than the other. I simply pointed that just because there are many hypotheses it doesn't follow from that alone that they are not falsifiable.

Oh well - in that case we agree. Carbon-compounds aren't the only thing that need to be in place for animals to be alive. But there are plenty of other things that go into maintaining animal life so that doesn't leave the conclusion 'there must be a spirit', I'm afraid.