It should be obvious to any non-religious person that there is no meaning to life beyond what humans invent and pretend. You consider such-and-such act "wrong" not because it is written into the laws of nature that this act is possible but somehow "evil", but because you do not like it or someone told you that you should not like it. But you should extend this understanding to life itself: the very idea of life is meaningless, and is no different from non-life, inanimateness, death.
Science struggles to define life in a way that includes everything we consider "alive" and excludes everything we consider "inanimate". Defining it as "able to move under its own power" or "consumes fuel and produces waste" would include automobiles. Defining it as "able to reproduce" would exclude mules and infertile creatures. Defining it through consciousness is impossible to prove, begs the question of solipsism, and might exclude plants anyway.
But even if science did discover such a definition, it would ignore the greater problem: the definition itself is but another scrap of meaning that humans layer over the universe. All life is but another chance arrangement of atoms, which coincidentally is usually very good at coercing other parts of the universe to become similar arrangements of atoms. Life is no different from any other chemical reaction that causes one compound to increase in quantity. Any attempt to define life would be like an attempt to define morality: it is guaranteed to allow some things that the judge finds repugnant and forbid some things that he thinks tolerable.
Science struggles to define life in a way that includes everything we consider "alive" and excludes everything we consider "inanimate". Defining it as "able to move under its own power" or "consumes fuel and produces waste" would include automobiles. Defining it as "able to reproduce" would exclude mules and infertile creatures. Defining it through consciousness is impossible to prove, begs the question of solipsism, and might exclude plants anyway.
But even if science did discover such a definition, it would ignore the greater problem: the definition itself is but another scrap of meaning that humans layer over the universe. All life is but another chance arrangement of atoms, which coincidentally is usually very good at coercing other parts of the universe to become similar arrangements of atoms. Life is no different from any other chemical reaction that causes one compound to increase in quantity. Any attempt to define life would be like an attempt to define morality: it is guaranteed to allow some things that the judge finds repugnant and forbid some things that he thinks tolerable.
