Life Itself is a Great Mystery

In the comedy Short Circuit, robot Number Five was struck by lightning and became alive. He had a personality and was able to think. When he accidentally killed a bug, he had trouble understanding that the bug could not be made alive again.

The Nativity by Jacques Stella, 1639

If you study on it, life is actually difficult to define. Naturalists define it in a chemical manner with cells processing, physiological activity happening, and all those rather mechanical procedures. All the ingredients of Number Five's dead bug were still there, but life had ceased. For that matter, Number Five was not alive (despite his protestations) according to naturalistic definitions.

Materialists cannot explain the origin of consciousness, but they still search for the physical location of the soul and free will. When misotheists complain that something is evil or wrong (such as claiming that by refuting Darwinism, creationists are "lying" about evolution), they are inconsistent. Atheism is irrational and incoherent, since we are just dancing to our chemical impulses; there is no absolute standard of morality for them. To complain about evil is to stand on the biblical worldview!

Morality, logic, love, and other intangible things cannot be defined or understood by materialism. They are not material. Life itself is not material. The reality is that life only comes from God our Creator. He wants us to have life — real, eternal life — so God the Son became a man. Most Christians celebrate his birth on Christmas, but he was born to give up his life on a cross. But he was bodily resurrected, defeating death.

No matter how much scientists learn about the complexities of organisms, they have not touched the more difficult questions—what is life itself, and where did it come from?

Have you ever thought about what life actually is? What mysterious quality makes a creature alive at one moment but is absent the instant the creature dies?

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An entry in Wikipedia admits, “There is no universal definition of life; there are a variety of definitions proposed by different scientists.” The latest Encyclopedia Britannica agrees that there is no “Although the scientists, technicians, and others who participate in studies of life easily distinguish living matter from inert or dead matter, none can give a completely inclusive, concise definition of life itself.” Nevertheless, the encyclopedia’s online version attempts a clunky definition with lots of complex scientific terms:

To read the article in its entirety, see "The Mystery of Life".