What about consuming energy makes you think I am in ANY WAY talking about a closed system?
What do you think I am leaving out of my description of life?
The vital spark provided by God?
Cannot be determined by scientific analysis. You were asking a biologist for a definition of life however, not a theologian.
The definition I provided is perfectly adequate for a physical description of what life is. If you want to get all metaphysical about the subject, have at it, but nothing of utility will come from it.
The way you were speaking connoted to my mind a state of entropy. (As if entropy = physical death). It is my understanding that entropy is that which inevitably occurs in closed systems.
What do you think I am leaving out of my description of life?.... The vital spark provided by God?
No. You continue to misunderstand me on his point. Questions about God are not scientific questions. Further, I am neither a mechanist nor a vitalist. What you are leaving out of your description of life are all the non-physical aspects (e.g., an explanation of biological organization targeted to biological function). Which being phenomenal ought to be susceptible to scientific analysis.
The fact is Darwin's theory has nothing to say about the organism qua organism. In fact Darwinism has effectively redefined biology, asserting that biology is about "evolution" rather than about "organism." In Robert Rosen's view (see his magisterial Life Itself, 1999, from which the following quotations were drawn; pp. 255–257), Darwin's theory turns evolution, thus biology, into "a collection of pure historical chronicles, like tables of random numbers, or stock exchange quotations."
Rosen can get even more pointed than that:
This picture struck me early as a kind of mythology, with evolution as protagonist, in its exact dictionary meaning of "serving to explain or sanctify some concept, usage, institution, or natural phenomenon."The definition I provided is perfectly adequate for a physical description of what life is. If you want to get all metaphysical about the subject, have at it, but nothing of utility will come from it.It was, for instance, entirely on such grounds that the ideas of Walter Elsasser ... were not only dismissed, but violently attacked, by those biologists who bothered to read what he had written. All Elsasser did was to exploit the [commonly accepted] assumption that organisms are "rare" among material systems, and hence disappear from "general laws" obtained by averaging. He was thus led to suggest that, in the sparse realm he envisioned for biology, there would be "biotonic laws" governing what went on there; not derivable from the average, "general" laws, although compatible with them. It was this last suggestion, that "laws" were operative at all in this biotonic realm, which exposed him to violent attack from the biological side. Mere paraphrase cannot convey the character of these. Here, for instance, are the words of [Nobel Laureate in Biology] Jacques Monod:
Summarized in a few words, here is Elsasser's position.With this language, then, Monod consigned Elsasser to the category of "scientific Vitalism," one of the lower rungs of his scientific Hell. And yet, all Elsasser did to deserve this was to draw an inconvenient conclusion from Monod's own assertion, embodied in the first few sentences of the preface to Chance and Necessity, that "Biology ... (is) marginal because — the living world constituting by a tiny and very 'special' part of the universe — it does not seem likely that the study of living beings will ever uncover general laws applicable outside the biosphere."The strange properties (of organisms) are doubtless not at odds with physics; but the physical forces and chemical reactions brought to light by the study of nonliving systems do not fully account for them. Hence it must be realized that over and above physical principles and adding themselves thereto, others are operative in living matter, but not in non-living systems where, consequently, these electively vital principles could not be discovered. It is these principles — or, to borrow from Elsasser's terminology, these "biotonic laws" — that must be elucidated.... The least one can say is that the arguments of these physicists is oddly lacking in strictness and solidity. (Chance and Necessity, pp. 27–28, emphases in original).
Monod's language, and that of countless other similar assertions which could be adduced, is clearly not the language of collegial scientific discourse. It is rather the response of someone who feels his myths are under attack. That is, it expresses a religious rather than a scientific attitude.
The above remarks from both Rosen and Monod do not deal with metaphysics.