Where Science And The Bible Meet

What about things that are alive but don't have blood?I mean, come on, this is ridiculous. Bacteria are alive, but don't have blood. Plants and fungi are alive, but don't have blood. Insects and crustaceans are alive, but don't have blood (they have haemolymph, it's a bit different).What about human cell cultures that we can keep alive in a nutrient substrate, without blood?What about the fact that you can't make something live just by adding blood?Blood is a carrier for oxygen and nutrients, little more.The Biblical view that blood contains some magical "life force" is nothing more than stone-age mythology. Christian apologetics that "see, the Bible was right, the life is in the blood" are being idiots as usual, ignoring everything that disagrees with their predetermined conclusion as well as the fact that the knowledge that blood is necessary for human life is rather obvious even for the most ignorant of civilizations.Seriously, do Christians think that no other societies had figured out that blood loss causes death?

Human tissue can survive without blood. We grow human skin for grafts using a nutrient substrate. The necessity of blood is not due to any special property of blood - there is no "magic life force" as the Bible clearly implies. Blood is necessary only because we do not currently have an effective alternate method for carrying nutrients to all of teh cells of the body. Skin is rather easy because you don't need to penetrate far - it's almost 2-dimensional. Carrying nutrients to something like a heart or a kidney is more difficult. Organs do, however, survive for short periods of time without blood, as shown in organ transplants - no blood is circulated while the organ is in transit, and if it is re-implanted within a short enough amount of time, it will survive. Clearly, life cannot be "in the blood."Still, scientists are working on artificial blood - that is, an alternative means of carrying nutrients to the body, so that blood donations will no longer be required.What will you say when they are eventually successful, and a human being lives without actual blood?How do you respond to the fact that most of the living things on this planet do not have blood, but are still alive?

...doesn't that completely refute the idea that "the life is in the blood?"

We know that, despite the claims of Peg and her literal reading of the Bible, blood has no special connection to life any more than the other myriad components of the human body. "The life" is no more "in the blood" than it is in the breath, or the lymph, or the cerebro-spinal fluid, all of which are also required for human life.There is no magic wishy-washy "life force," in the blood or otherwise. This is a decidedly primitive view of life taken from a culture with only the most basic understanding of life and the human body. It's not a reflection of some profound truth, or even a miraculous "scientific" revelation from God. It's the result of the simple observation that sufficient blood loss causes death, and the extrapolation that blood must therefore be "special." Remember, in the remaining context of the Bible, blood is treated differently than other body parts or fluids - Jesus' blood is supposed to wash away sins; God demands animal blood sacrifice in the Old Testament.But today, we know that life is not a magical energy field, or ethereal mist contained in living things. "Life" is simply a specific and complex set of self-replicating chemical processes; interruption of those chemical processes causes death, and that interruption can be caused through myriad ways, not limited to simply removing all blood from an animal.Putting blood into an inanimate object does not give it life.
Most living things on the planet (plants, bacteria, insects, crustaceans, etc) do not have blood at all.
Human tissue can survive without blood given a substitute nutrient substrate (which is how we grow skin grafts and cell cultures).Even the Bible seems conflicted, because in Genesis it seems that life is in breath:

quote:

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Genesis
2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
...
7:22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

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We know, of course, that there is no mystical "breath of life" either - but this demonstrates that the Bible is not making a profound revelation of scientific information when it says "the life is in the blood;" rather, it is promoting a common primitive view of what life is.You cannot live without blood. But you also cannot live without your kidneys, or your liver, or your lungs, or your heart, or your immune system, or your lymphatic system, or your brain, or your spine, or your skeleton, or your skin, or your digestive system...There is nothing special about blood relative to any of these other systems. The Bible is simply, flatly, incorrect, as would be expected of a text written by people with no real understanding of what constitutes life.