2084 by John C. Lennox

Author:John C. Lennox [Lennox, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

HUMAN LIFE HAS A MATERIAL BASE

The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

Genesis 2:7

Genesis readily admits that human beings have a material base. God uses pre-existing material to create them. That is, human beings are the result of the mind of God working on pre-existing matter that God originally created. Artificial life, if it ever is made, will be the result of the minds of humans working on pre-existing matter.

This is the ground zero stage, and yet even getting there is faced by apparently unsurmountable difficulty, as the work of chemist James Tour cited earlier shows: “The proposals offered thus far to explain life’s origin make no scientific sense. Beyond our planet, all the others that have been probed are lifeless, a result in accord with our chemical expectations. The laws of physics and chemistry’s Periodic Table are universal, suggesting that life based upon amino acids, nucleotides, saccharides and lipids is an anomaly. Life should not exist anywhere in our universe. Life should not even exist on the surface of the earth.”13

Tour is talking about life in its simplest form here. Human life is vastly more complex still, and according to Genesis, it does not come about by self-organisation of the already shaped material base, nor from some electrical or chemical shock, nor from some vague “emergence.” We are told that the source of life is the breath of God, a divine intervention, apparently distinct from material creation.

This raises the question: Will humans ever be able, analogously, to breathe the breath of life into any material artefact that they have constructed? In this connection, think of the body of someone who died one second ago. All the material that goes to make up a human being is still there. But the person is no longer alive. Could it be restored in some way? Now, of course, the person may have died from a heart malfunction. Suppose we had a healthy heart available. Would it be enough, say, to quickly replace the heart and then give the body an electric shock? Or suppose we could one day build a human body, chemically, molecule by molecule, so that it lay before us on a table. Could we now get it to live biologically? If not, why not? What exactly is physical life? We simply do not know in any deep sense.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.