5.5 What Is Life? The Biblical View (OB20)

Up to this point, we emphasized that information is an essential characteristic of life. The realization that information is an intellectual entity saves us from regarding life as purely mechanistic. But the essentials of life have not yet been fully encompassed, as can immediately be realized from the following: At the moment of death, the totality of DNA information is still present in all the cells, but the operational and communication information has disappeared. It is thus clear that there is another crucial difference between living beings and dead organisms which cannot be found in the material domain. Gilbert Ryle described this aspect as follows [D1, p. 79]:

Though the human body is an engine, it is not quite an ordinary engine, since some of its workings are governed by another engine inside it—this interior governor-engine being one of a very special sort. It is invisible, inaudible, and it has no size or weight. It cannot be taken to bits and the laws it obeys are not those known to ordinary engineers.

He has addressed the soul of man which is part of his non-material being (see also OB8). It cannot be tested physically or chemically, but reveals itself in the nature of man, particularly in his free will (discussed more fully in [G2, p. 190–194]). We have repeatedly emphasized that the origin of the non-material part of man can also be ascribed to the Creator. The following formulation can now be established along biblical lines:

THEOREM: No life can exist outside the will of God.

Equation L3 which clearly surpasses L2, can now be deduced from biblical testimony:

Life = material part (structural appearance) + non-material part 1 (= the structural, operational, and communication information encoded by God) + non-material part 2 (= soul, spirit) (L3)

This formula points beyond scientifically researchable possibilities. As a point of departure, the basic evolutionary assumptions E3 and E5 have thus proved to be false.