Life is not a commercial good. The difference between a live body and a dead body is not one of degree, but of kind. No superadded quantity of energy or money will bring a mere aggregation of matter to life if it does not partake in the
sui generis emergent form that identifies it as a discrete, atomic organism—centralized coordination. Frankenstein had to do a lot of work on
shaping his creature to conform to his own image before he was ready for the lightning bolt.
Life is truly priceless for, unlike energy, it is not a conserved quantity or even a quantity at all. It is more like a Word, a single syllable that illuminates the Speaker in a flash, as it were.* The man who speaks of human life as a quantity that can be balanced against “commensurate” quantities of gold or goods is the man who forgets his own Father.
John 1:1 said:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
What a falling off was there from the Word that spoke Being to the words that speak
of beings! Our words are not even the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave—they are the shadows of the shadows!
* Leibniz called it a “thundering of the divinity;” Kant called it the synthesis of the understanding; our scientists call it the collapse of the wave function. In all three cases, the referent is the same: a singular act of creation out of the nothingness of theoretical “possibility,” a miracle
par excellence.