Does Death Pose Challenge To Abiogenesis

So you didn't really mean it when you wrote "but without a spirit and soul it won't have life." I see.

Does an E. coli bacterium have a spirit?

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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

Because they don't have all the parts needed to be alive, for example, a working brain.

I already explained this in one of my previous posts, human beings can survive even with a dead brain and that's what we see in victims of brain death.

Your link is no good.

Read here for an explanation of this experiment that was done in 1907.

Plenty has been made of this because of a movie 21 Grams that came out a few years ago.

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Despite the poor accuracy of his scales, the huge variability in his data, and the all-too-few people studied, MacDougall's experiment was also frustrated by the tricky skill of pinpointing the exact time of death. He was repeatedly challenged as to why the weight change on death appeared to take longer in some patients than others. To rebut the doubters, MacDougall wrote: "The soul's weight is removed from the body virtually at the instant of the last breath, though in persons of sluggish temperament, it may remain in the body for a full minute."

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Firstly, six (as in the six dying patients) is not a large enough sample size. When I studied statistics, my lecturer convinced me that, concerning people preferring one cola to another, "8 out of 10 is not statistically significant, but 16 out of 20 is".

Second, he got "good" results (ie, the patient irreversibly lost weight at the moment of death) from just one of the six patients, not all six! Two of the results had to be excluded because of "technical difficulties". One patient's death did show a drop in weight of about three-eighths of an ounce - but this later reversed itself! Two of the other patients registered an immediate loss of weight at the moment of death, but then their weight dropped again a few minutes later. (Does this mean that they died twice!?) Only one of the six patients showed a sudden and non-reversible loss of weight of three-fourths of an ounce (21 grams).

The third problem is a little more subtle. Even today, with all of our sophisticated technology, it is still sometimes very difficult to determine the precise moment of death. And which death did he mean - cellular death, brain death, physical death, heart death, legal death, etc? How could Dr. Duncan MacDougall be so precise back in 1907? And anyhow, how accurate and precise were his scales back in 1907?

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Source

And from the British Journal of Sports Medicine

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So what can we learn from this subject. First, bad science will often be published providing it is sensational (note the converse does not hold). Second, always do press interviews—your fame will be magnified by the amount of press space devoted to your claim, however bogus.

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Hardly any proof for the existence of a soul.
This is what confounds me about fundies and creationists. They excoriate science and the scientific method ever day, but cling to any semblance of science to justify their beliefs. I thought the 'soul' was an immaterial entity. If the 'soul' had weight than it must have other physical properties too. Why couldn't he see it or feel it?

Edited by Theodoric, : No reason given.

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

How about a dead heart? Are you saying the soul is in the heart not in the brain?

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

So you didn't really mean it when you wrote "but without a spirit and soul it won't have life." I see.

I wasn't so clear but when I said soul I specifically was referring to human beings not other organisms.

all this criticisms are unfounded such as poor scales being used in these experiments, and the rest have been answered MacDougall himself.

Cedre writes: I already explained this in one of my previous posts, human beings can survive even with a dead brain and that's what we see in victims of brain death.

A human with a non functioning brain is alive? Evidence please. The fact we can restart it a few minutes after death does not mean there's a spirit there.

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I hunt for the truth

I am the one Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore.
-Lyrics by Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

ow about a dead heart? Are you saying the soul is in the heart not in the brain?

No. What I'm saying is despite the presence of all the necessary parts for life dead organisms like human beings remain dead, despite all the components being there that are needed for life.

A human with a non functioning brain is alive? Evidence please. The fact we can restart it a few minutes after death does not mean there's a spirit there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_death, http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch212/ch212d.html.

Cedre writes: No. What I'm saying is despite the presence of all the necessary parts for life dead organisms like human beings remain dead, despite all the components being there that are needed for life.

And for the second (or third) time, they don't. They lack a functioning brain, for example.

Your argument is puerile junk I'm afraid Cedre:

Junk? Well:

All you have done is replace the human driver with a non-human driver, in the end the car still requires a driver without a driver its not going to move and won't display any speed.

You can start a car, put it in gear, wedge a bit of wood on the accelerator and bingo the car will move...with no driver....and displays 'speed'. So your argument is junk.

Puerile? Well the whole point of the analogy was to show you that if you build something out of a list of components, and as a consequence of that build, the object displays a property (speed) in this case, that was not in the component list....then you have demonstrated an emergent property. It is utterly irrelevant whether there is a driver, a block of wedged wood or a gorilla at the helm - the 'speed' is only possible because of the special arrangement of the initial component build.

You seem really confused re life processes in this regard so let's build further and look at the car/ biological life comparison.

An analogy is simply used to compare something which may be difficult to understand (life/spirit/soul) to something more familiar (car/speed). No analogy is perfect and differences and similarities are always apparent with an analogy.

Here the similarities are:

Both have material building block components, organic molecules for life, metal etc for car (some of the car's components are also organic - oil, cloth for seats, plastic). Both need fuel - life needs organic compounds such as sugars, cars need petrol/diesel. Both uses the oxygen in the air to burn the fuel to provide energy that then does useful work (moves the car or allows bodies to function). Even the ultimate source of energy for both is the same - our sun provides the energy of both the petrol/oil (from fossil fuels) and the food animals eat.

Differences in the analogy: animals can self-repair (to a limited amount, cars obviously can't - one up to animals!
When a car runs out of fuel, although it loses its speed it can recover with more fuel added. If you add more fuel a month later, the car will be OK again - not so with biological life. That's because continuous energy is needed to maintain the structural integrity of an organism - one to the car!

Let's design a car more like an animal in this last respect: The metal sodium is explosive in contact with air. It is kept in oil to protect it from the oxygen atmosphere when stored as the metal. Although sodium is too soft to be as useful metal in building cars, let’s just pretend that we have, in fact built such a car. One problem would be that we would need to have a pump going that continuously sprayed a film of protective oil over the expose sodium surfaces of the car. The oil would wear off in a short time, and so this pump would have to be continuous.

In such a car, if it ran out of fuel and broke down, the power supplying the pump would cease and the oil film would stop. Then oxygen would get to the sodium surfaces, react explosively and the car would never work again - not even when fuel is put back in...Because the structure of the car is now no longer able to perform its function - lack of energy to maintain it has resulted in deformation of the material structure to the point of organisational collapse of the components.

This is now more comparable to our life analogy - though life is even more critical in the time before degradation to start. Our energy comes from 'burning' oxygen and organic fuel (sugars)and a mere 4 minutes without oxygen starts causing brain damage as the brain cells begin dying - the corresponding analogy to the sodium engine of the car starting to 'burn' as the oil film protector starts failing.

It's a sobering thought - but your emergent 'soul' has no more protection against a failure of energy supply, than a car described above would have against its loss of speed when its engine rusts away.

You can start a car, put it in gear, wedge a bit of wood on the accelerator and bingo the car will move...with no driver....and displays 'speed'. So your argument is junk.

You needed a driver to start the car, you can't escape the driver so my argument isn't junk.

It is utterly irrelevant whether there is a driver, a block of wedged wood or a gorilla at the helm - the 'speed' is only possible because of the special arrangement of the initial component build.

No you need a driver to start the car.

From the very first line of the article:

Wiki writes: Brain death is a legal definition of death that refers to the irreversible end of all brain activity

So no a person with a non functioning brain, is not alive.

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I hunt for the truth

I am the one Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore.
-Lyrics by Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

I'm sorry, firstly the person is alive and is placed on life support if he/she were dead he/she would have been placed in a morgue somewhere. Secondly its the legal definition the individual still has bodily function.

Please explain why criticisms are unfounded. I mean other than you said so.

1) only 6 subjects
2) 2 had to be discarded
3) 2 showed immediate drop in weight that increased over time
4) 1 showed showed an immediate drop that reversed right away but later recurred
5) determining exact moment of death

McDougall's later conclusion just show he was trying to mnake the results fit.

For example.

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MacDougall said the moment in question was when the person exhaled the final breath and would try to explain away the inconsistencies between the drop rate by claiming that "the soul's weight is removed from the body virtually at the instant of last breath, though in persons of sluggish temperament it may remain in the body a full minute. Of course, one wonders how he was able to determine that as the reason (or what qualifies as a "sluggish temperament"). Assumptions are at every step of his experiment and are later used to make the evidence conform to the "theory."

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How about backing things up instead of justing making unjustified comments.

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