What is Life?

Where did it come from?


What is life and where did it come from?

One of the most fundamentally significant scientific discoveries of recent years is the very nature of what life is.
Science has come to realise that every biological system  has  2 basic fundamental  components, on the one hand there is lifeless chemicals and on the other we have the information contained in our genomes that organise those chemicals into the mind-blowingly sophisticated  structures we call life. It is the importance of this information that is built into life that has profound implications as to our understanding of what life is and where it came from.
It is this information that turns chemistry into biology.
A world leading scientist by the name of Craig Ventor, the head of the team that first sequenced the human genome, as well as the team that produced the world’s first synthetic life form, has described life as a software driven process and our genome as our operating system.

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Scientists, like Ventor, can now manipulate a cells genome with a computer, load that genome back into a cell and fundamentally change the very nature of the cell.  Our genomes are in a very literal sense a executable computational algorithm that controls life.  Our cells are continually reading and executing parts of that algorithm in every moment of our lives.

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That is a very bold statement.  But to understand why that is the case we need to take a closer look at the very nature of information itself and in particular the type of information found in life, that is Specified  Functional information , sometimes referred to as  Prescriptive information ( it prescribes for something)

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This discovery sheds a great deal of light on the question of the origins of life, why?   Because any algorithm, or functional information, of the type we have discovered in life, has only one known source,  that is prior intelligence.

That is a very bold statement.  But to understand why that is the case we need to take a closer look at the very nature of information itself and in particular the type of information found in life, that is Specified  Functional information , sometimes referred to as  Prescriptive information ( it prescribes for something)

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And not just us, every living thing on this planet, from Bacteria to butterflies from plants to polar bears, runs a
variation of the same software program. This planet with its absolute abundance of life, fair hums, as  countless
numbers of biological computers  process information of such vast quantities that that by comparison the internet pales into insignificance in terms of the volume of the information processed. It is not just the quantity of information that is impressive it is also the quality and sophistication of those programs.
Some years ago Bill Gates described the information in life as being like a computer program but far more advanced than any software we have created.

This discovery sheds a great deal of light on the question of the origins of life, why?   Because any algorithm, or functional information, of the type we have discovered in life, has only one known source,  that is prior intelligence.

Conclusion

The elephant in the room

SETI scientists are working hard to find evidence for the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And yet, right under their noses we have an example of a semiotic system of such power and sophistication that it makes humanities most complex information processing systems look primitive by comparison.

And yet many people refuse to accept the obvious conclusion that the information in life gives positive support to the idea that life has been designed. Why do I say it is obvious?

Well, the world we live in is awash with examples of semiosis. Written text is everywhere, speech, pictorial signs and computer programs, countless numbers of Radio, TV and mobile phone signals pass signals through our bodies every second of every day.  And every example we have can all be traced back to the deliberate creative activity of a conscious intelligent mind.

By contrast we could ask, how many examples are there of a complex semiotic system that we can demonstrate has a naturalistic undirected material source?.... none. How many examples do we have of even a simple semiotic system that we can demonstrate has a naturalistic undirected material source?  none, not one!

The universe is a vast space with every possible opportunity to be able to create semiotic information using the fundamental laws of nature and every other physical process available to it, but it has not done so!

All known examples of semiosis have an intelligent source. That is a demonstrateable, evidence based, empirical conclusion.  Any suggestion to the contrary is pure speculation.

The scientific method

It is interesting to note that while the entire scientific process rests on its ability to demonstrate the fulfilment of a theoretical prediction in a verifiable and repeatable way.  The only example we have of semiotic information string who's origin can actually be debated is the information that controls and regulates biology.

Materialists insist that this information has an undirected natural cause but can not demonstrate a single example of any semiotic system being produced by an unintelligent process.

This is in stark contrast with the incalculable number of semiotic information strings which can be clearly and repeatedly be demonstrated to have a conscious intelligent origin. With that in mind the question needs to be asked, in what way is the materialist view of the origin of biological information scientific?

Conclusion

• Life is a software / information driven process.

• Information is not physical it is conceptual.

• The only known source of semiotic information is prior intelligence. 

• Life is therefore the direct product of a deliberate creative intellectual processes.

To repeat what we said earlier, semiotic information is not a tangible entity and as such it is beyond the reach of and cannot be created by any undirected physical process.

This is not an argument about probability.

Conceptual semiotic information is simply beyond the sphere of influence of any undirected physical process.

Semiosis cannot store or transmit physical objects because it itself is not physical, it is immaterial. On its own, it lacks the capacity to create, interact with or manipulate the material world without the actions of an inteligent third party.

And the reverse is also true, the physical world of physics and chemistry cannot create anything immaterial because it lacks the capacity to create, interact with or manipulate a concept. The physical world cannot possibly create what is the very basic driving force of biology… semiotic  coded information.

To suggest that a physical process can create semiotic code is like suggesting that a rainbow can write poetry... it can not!  Physics and chemistry alone do not possess the tools to create a concept.
Coded information manipulates the laws of chemistry and physics to create the physical world of biology, it is not the other way around.

The only cause capable of creating conceptual semiotic information is a conscious intelligent mind.

Life is no accident, the vast quantity of semiotic information in life provides powerful positive evidence that we have been designed.

To quote one scientist working at the cutting edge of our understanding of the programing information in biology, he described what he saw as an “alien technology written by an engineer a million times smarter than us”  

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Many people sincerely believe that science has explained the origin of life without the need for an intelligent creator. That is not the case. That may well have seemed a viable conclusion in the past, but not anymore. A growing avalanche of scientific evidence now very firmly points to the conclusion that we have been created. The complex semiotic software that controls life gives powerful evidence that we are the product of a deliberate intellectual process. Software can not write itself!

Therefore the unavoidable conclusion is that life is no accident, it has been designed. Life is the direct product of a deliberate intellectual creative process.

There is no plausible alternative!
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