(September 24, 2008 at 12:49 am)EvidenceVsFaith Wrote: If our vital organs work we have LIFE and if atleast one of our vital organs don't work, we don't have LIFE.
As to what gives us life...basically we have evolved from other more primitive organisms and if you go way back to the beginning of life you will find that originally life came out of non-life... After all we ourselves are made up of a lot of 'non-living' elements like calcium and iron for example. Life orignally came out of non-life, because what is life but simply non-life that has a nervous system...can think....has emotions...organs...etc, etc, etc?
One theory I've heard of is that an asteroid crashed on earth before life existed, (atleast on earth) and some asteroids are thought to carry quite large amounts of some form of protein. Might be BS but who knows. I don't believe it but I accept it as a possibility, I don't know of any evidence to support such a claim yet. Maybe someone else has info on this?
What I'm saying is that LIFE isn't just the beating of our heart. My mother, who recently passed away last month unexpectedly, had to have brain surgery to remove a blood clot. Though she lived through the surgery, the swelling in her brain shortly afterwards pretty much sealed the deal of her fate. That whole time we were just waiting for her body to shut down. What happened was her brain was pretty much dead and couldn't send the signals to the rest of her organs anyways. So technically, even though the rest of her organs (heart, liver, lungs, etc.) were in perfect working condition, the swelling in the brain which had blocked off the main stem which feeds down info to the rest of the organs would eventually stop. Meaning, the rest of the organs would begin shutting off.
So that whole time, one might say she was alive because her heart was still beating but "clinically" she was a goner.
Sure, that was my mother's body laying there on the hospital bed but was it really her? Did she really have life?
Life is NOT just the fact that we are "breathing" but that there is a "spirit" within us that makes us "alive". A robot can be charged up to be "animate" but does it really have "life"?