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... The first question about life is “Is it a process or an entity, an activity or a thing?”. Is life a substance or force permeating living beings which is not present in non living entities? Or is life the activities that go on in living beings? ...

<p>“The commonly cited case for intelligent design appeals to: (a) the irreducible complexity of (b) some aspects of life. But complex arguments invite complex refutations (valid or otherwise), and the claim that only some aspects of life are irreducibly complex implies that others are not, and so the average person remains unconvinced. Here I use another principle—autopoiesis (self-making)—to show that all aspects of life lie beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations. Autopoiesis provides a compelling case for intelligent design in three stages: (i) autopoiesis is universal in all living things, which makes it a pre-requisite for life, not an end product of natural selection; (ii) the inversely-causal, information-driven, structured hierarchy of autopoiesis is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry; and (iii) there is an unbridgeable abyss between the dirty, mass-action chemistry of the natural environmental and the perfectly-pure, single-molecule precision of biochemistry.”</p>

In Part I of this article,1 I argued as follows: (i) Autopoiesis (self-making) is universal and therefore essential to life, so it is required at the beginning for life to exist and is thus not the end product of some long naturalistic process. (ii) Each level of the autopoietic hierarchy is separated from the one below it by a Polanyi impossibility, so it cannot be reduced to any sequence of naturalistic causes. (iii) There is an unbridgeable abyss between the autopoietic hierarchy and the dirty mass-action chemistry of the natural environment. In this part, I test the integrity of this...