Again, I aver a better definition is successful communication (Shannon) in nature.
Where there is successful communication in nature, there is life. When it ceases, there is death. And where it never happened, there is non-life.
"Purpose" in that definition is a matter of the message itself, whether to maintain, replicate, metabolize, organize, etc.
It is also mathematics, universal and holds up to intense scrutiny. And as a bonus it offends neither side of the ones who refuse to look any further: "nature did it" v "God did it."
Can you define information for me such that only living things can carry it and death is the absence of it?
Ever see Godfather? A dead horse’s head definitely conveyed information! ;)
My definition has nothing to do with what life looks like, it defines what actions are necessary and sufficient to describe something as alive.
Do you think anything in biology that has purpose is a doorway to finding the ULTIMATE purpose?
DNA polymerase is the enzyme responsible for the “replication” part of the definition. The function of DNA polymerase is to replicate DNA. The “purpose” of DNA polymerase is to perform that function.
Science doesn't want to talk about "purpose" dearest sister in Christ. For "purpose" is precisely Aristotle's final cause — which Francis Bacon and Newtonian particle mechanics banished from science.
The reason they don't want to talk about it is the Newtonian formalism simply cannot admit the notion of final cause (telos). That formalism is premised on the core ideas of state, state transitions, and recursivity. What it putatively "maps to" in the natural world is one state "entailing" or determining a next state in a step-by-step series of irreversible timesteps. Thus the Newtonian version of the "law" of causation: There cannot be, in principle, any "pull from the future" in this paradigm. The very idea is banned.
The idea of final cause in a certain sense seems to refer to a "pull from the future." For final cause denotes a purpose or goal that manifests formal cause (something analogous to a blueprint or schematic diagram) over time, by means of material (matter) and efficient (force) causes. A purpose or goal thus supervenes over the operations of its own realization in a global, not a step-by-step way. (If I might put it that way.)
Which probably sounds like a perfect abstraction signifying nothing we really care about. Except for one thing: If we want to understand biological function, I simply do not see how this can be done outside of the framework of final causation. For the very idea of "function" connotes a purpose at work, more or less constantly over time, entailing its needed resources, ever moving toward realization. In a formal sense, at bottom, final causes are what organize and realize all the needful functions of biological nature.
At bottom, this would mean that Nature is not a random enterprise. It has structure built into it that can be "teased out" and understood by means of formal (mathematical) modeling techniques. The structure and intelligibility of the universe are the most amazingly wonderful and astonishing things. They seem to have "been made to 'go together'."....
Where final causes, or the information necessary to the realization of final causes, come from, I don't know (if I'm wearing my scientist hat that is. When that's on, I'm "required" to be "agnostic." Of course, I do take it off now and then, to engage "higher order questions." :^) ) .
For as you say, dearest sister in Christ, no known source of "biologically relevant" information has yet been identified within the observable universe. But whatever its source, the Shannon model definitely looks like the universal description of how it must be communicated.
To God be the glory!
Thank you ever so much dearest sister in Christ for your simply marvelous and thought provoking essay/post!