What Is Life?

The Catholic Thing

By David Warren The students of galactic structure in our early universe are, shall we say, surprised. That the galaxies are there, at all, is part of their charm. It now also seems that they appeared much earlier than expected in our cosmic models. But it is worse than that. The objects, we've now learned, are bigger and brighter than anyone expected, and many of the galaxies show an unintelligible maturity. Disc galaxies that resemble our Milky Way, more than ten billion years later, were waiting to tease us. The problem for those with pinched brows is not that the "standard model" of the universe might be wrong. The problem is that it is not chaotic; that nothing seems to be. For it is a matter of secular faith among scientists that the universe, and everything in it, evolved. For at least two centuries this has been undisputed. Few can imagine that it hasn't evolved, and in a random manner, from initial chaos to relative order. To question this would be to utter a scientific heresy, that is equally a commonplace. The thing about worlds that we cannot imagine, is that we cannot imagine them. Ditto, it's all but impossible to imagine a sequence of history that is not a sequence. Our brains are not ready for that, and will never be, so long as we are "trapped" in a condition that will always have a before, and an after. Except, there is not a before and an after in God. For when we say He is infinite, we are making an easy concession. Nobody knows what infinite might be, or has ever dreamed of going there. It is just a word, a disembodied symbol. It is not even a number, or the largest multiplication of number. I hereby give my scientific readers permission to give up. By doing this, I utter another "scientific heresy." For we cannot imagine giving up on the whole enterprise, to discover the first principle - of everything. To give up would be death, in our colloquial understanding. It is to admit that there are unknowable things, and "no way forward." Faith alone transcends death - the sun of light and justice - according to the religion that some have embraced. And we are "immortal" - another word for something we fail to understand. Because "forever" is another flirtation with the impossible, unimaginable infinity. It is speculation of a world, a universe, in which there is no before and after - even if we try to imagine multiple befores, and evermores. I am trying to grasp what needs to be grasped before we can investigate the question, "What is life?" We cannot even define death, plausibly. "Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that has not." (I picked this out of the "Wicked paedia.") It is a quick, inadequate definition, which reduces to: "death is the opposite of life." We imagine it as inert matter, but that it is not. Lots of things in my environment are lifelessly moving, so to speak. Yet they were never alive. And I can make a few of them go still, without killing them. Dead is, as it were, inert matter that was formerly alive. It is only the opposite of what was formerly alive. It has this much in common with the living, and as fossil hunters must agree, it will always have. But dropping life into the past is not satisfactory. We can only do that when we are speaking glibly. A scientist wants to know when it was alive, and how it died, and perhaps such subtleties as, "What species?" But whatever the answers, we are still taking life for granted. My question, "What is life?" requires an answer that tells us more than, "It is the opposite of death." It also requires more than the (basically unavailable) answer to the question, "How did it come to be?" The watch that William Paley discovered, while walking idly through the sands of time, had an intelligent designer whom we could possibly locate in the history of pocket watches. But the ladybug that has just landed on my computer screen has no such designer, says Ric...