Atheists: Facing the unfaceable

[Thumpalumpacus]

Is a car alive? I mean, you could put all the parts in a pile and they won't get you home, but if they're in the right place, then you're good to go. That doesn't mean that the car has a spirit. It just means that the rights things are in the right place to do a job.

You might wish to familiarize yourself with the concept of emergent properties.

For the car, the ingredient that makes the car function is gasoline. That product is not part of the car, and when it runs out, the car stops functioning.

Not so. You could have gas in the tank in your pile of parts, yet they still won't be a functioning automobile.

We don't have to wait for the car to break down, but just until it runs out of gas. What we know about emergent properties only applies to the evolution of living organisms.

This is special pleading and demonstrably false. The structure of galaxies is an emergent property brought about by the intersection of two properties of matter ("masses attract" and "momentum is conserved").

What emergent properties can be used to explain how inanimate materials become a living organism?

You clearly don't understand emergent properties. There's not a list of them that you can apply to this or that situation. Emergent properties emerge from the complex interactions of matter.

Explaining how life came from non-life -- abiogenesis is the term you're looking for, by the way -- is a matter of chemistry, which is not an emergent property. The metabolic process of life is the emergent result of the interaction of the chemicals which constitute a body, when structured in a manner to permit their interaction.

Perhaps, like the car, that property comes from something that is not material make -up of the organism. Not that it would disprove the existence of an afterlife, but if scientists create a totally living organism they will definitely get my attention.

No, if you care to extend the vehicular analogy, the external input which makes the human vehicle run would be food -- not any hypothetical soul or spirit.

And, as noted above, the motive power for a vehicle doesn't derive solely from gasoline. If I drove to the filling station today and pumped that gas into the bed of my pickup truck, it would not be able to use it.

My point in drawing the analogy is that the component parts of an object, be it a vehicle or an animal, are very rarely sufficient for normal functioning. You cannot disregard the role of process in any system -- but claiming that because process is not material, it must be irrational is not borne out by fact. The process which makes the human body tick is no more spiritual than the process which makes a vehicle take you down the highway.

Regardless of what you may think, I not at all closed to science.

I don't think you're closed to science, but I do think your perspective on it, and understanding of it, is skewed by your faith.