Wounded King

I know what you mean.

Gracchus

"Life" is a term applied to a class of chemical reactions. Which reactions the term is applied to is a matter of convenience or clarity. All biology is chemistry, just as all chemistry is physics. It is a fundamental mistake to think that words are more than convenient short hand descriptions of subsets of one universal space-time field.

Fundamentalists are seldom so obvious as to bow down to wood and stone. They bow down and worship words, whose meanings they change, as necessary to justify their actions.

yguy

This contradicts what I said how, exactly?

You obviously don't know me very well.

Kimpatsu

No, thank god!

GunnerJ

T EVERYONE: This is the sort of crap Doubting warned you all to stop.

TO REITERATE: STOP SNIPING AT EACH OTHER LIKE PRE-SCHOOLERS KTHNXBYE.

-GunnerJ, E&C Moderator

Gracchus

There is no clear definition between alive and not alive. Thus, there is no way to show that something "not alive" can become "alive".

Intellectually, by your own testimony, you are "challenged". I don't know if you kick your dog.

Kimpatsu

Oh, come on. That was funny. (Well, slightly!)

yguy

Don't forget you're in a monastery.

Kimpatsu

Is that why you keep monk-eying around?

yguy

Then how can you say that YOU are alive? Or that a rock is not?

You're just playing semantic games. At some point in time, there was no life on earth. At some subsequent time, single celled organisms appeared which no modern biologist would call anything but alive. The question, then, is how did we get from the first point to the second, and why can't we duplicate the process artificiallly?