How Did Life Begin?

Josh Anderson at Quora responds to the question whether it's "possible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that intelligence was required to create life."

His reply is quite interesting. Here it is in full, slightly edited:

Yes, it is. Here’s the question you should ask yourself: Is symbolic code something that blind, intelligence-free physical processes could create and use? Or is mind alone up to the task?

The legendary John Von Neumann (1903-1957) did important work on self-replicating systems. A towering giant in the history of mathematics and pioneer in computer science, he was interested in describing machine-like systems that could build faithful copies of themselves.

Von Neumann soon recognized that it would require both hardware and software. Such a system had to work from a symbolic representation of itself. That is, it must have a kind of encoded picture of itself in some kind of memory.

Crucially, this abstract picture had to include a precise description of the very mechanisms needed to read and execute the code.

Makes sense, right? To copy itself it has to have a blueprint to follow. And this blueprint has to include instructions for building the systems needed to decode and implement the code.

In order to replicate itself, Von Neumann is asserting, a computer would have to be programmed with a complete set of instructions to direct the replication process. But how could a computer program itself to replicate itself?

Here’s the remarkable thing: Life is a Von Neumann Replicator. Von Neumann was unwittingly describing the DNA based genetic system at the heart of life. And yet, he was doing so years before we knew about these systems.

The implications of this are profound. Think about how remarkable this is. It’s like having the blueprints and operating system for a computer stored on a drive in digital code that can only be read by the device itself. It’s the ultimate chicken and egg scenario.

Again, how would a computer ever "know" how to program itself to produce a copy of itself without input at some point from a mind?

How might something like this have come about? For a system to contain a symbolic representation of itself [there has to be an] actualization of precise mapping between two realms, the physical realm and an abstract symbolic realm.

In view here is a kind of translation, mechanisms that can move between encoded descriptions and material things being described. This requires a system of established correlations between stuff out here and information instantiated in a domain of symbols.

Here’s the crucial question: Is this something that can be achieved by chance, physical laws, or intelligence-free material processes? The answer is decidedly NO. What’s physical cannot work out the non-physical. Only a mind can create a true code.

Only a mind can conceive of and manage abstract, symbolic realities. A symbolic system has to be invented. It cannot come about in any other way.

Another way to say this is that there's a vast chasm between immaterial, abstract information (symbols) and physical machines. The only way to bridge that chasm, whether in computers or human beings, is through a mind. But on naturalism there was no mind present when the first cells evolved the ability to replicate.

So how did they?

If you think something like this - mutually interdependent physical hardware and encoded software - can arise through unguided, foresight-less material forces acting over time, think again.

If I were to ask you to think of something, anything that absolutely requires intelligence to bring about, you’d be hard pressed to think of a better example. It’s not just that no one understands how it could be done, it’s that we have every reason to believe that it is impossible in principle.

No intelligence-free material processes could ever give you something like this. (i.e. a complex, self-replicating entity like a living cell)

But wait, how can we be so sure this feature of life was not forged by evolution, built up incrementally by the unseen hand of natural selection? What’s to say this is beyond the ability of evolution to create?

The question answers itself. In order for evolution to take place you have to have a self-replicating system in place. You don’t evolve to the kind of thing we’ve been describing. That is, necessarily, where you begin.

Evolution cannot get started until the first self-replicating system exists, but how does that first system come to exist? How, in other words, does life begin apart from a mind?

The DNA and the dizzyingly complex molecular machinery that it both uses and describes did not evolve into existence. This much is clear.

Any suggestion that it did is not based on a scintilla of empirical evidence or any credible account of how it could have come about in this way.

The conclusion is clear: The unmistakable signature of mind is literally in every cell of every living thing on earth.

Every living thing is comprised of millions if not trillions of self-replicating biological factories called cells. Naturalists insist that this ability to self-replicate evolved without any help from a mind, but they have no answer to the question of how that would've even been possible.

The claim that it did is no more than an assertion of blind faith.