Two examples of light sensitive carbon-based animate molecules: human (or human molecule) and retinal (or retinal molecule), the latter NOT conceptualized as either alive nor dead nor in possession of “life” (nor afterlife nor prelife), whereas the former is, owing to historically outdated models of humans—both, however, unified in the conclusion that life does not exist (disabused by Thims in 2009), in the same sense that ether does not exist (disabused by Einstein in 1905) or caloric does not exist (disabused by Rumford in 1798). The term "abioism" is the reasoned belief or conclusion that "life" does not exist.

“The biologist wants to understand life, but life, as such, does not exist: nobody has ever seen it. What we call ‘life’ is a certain quality, the sum of certain reactions of systems of matter, as the smile is the quality or reaction of the lips.”

“Every biologist has at some time asked ‘what is life?’ and none has ever given a satisfactory answer. Science is built on the premise that nature answers intelligent questions intelligently; so if no answer exists, there must be something wrong with the question. Life, as such, does not exist. What we can see and measure are material systems which have the wonderful quality of ‘being alive’. What we can ask more hopefully is ‘what are the properties which bring matter to life? Though I do not know what life is, I have no doubt as to whether my dog is alive or dead. Life is a paradox. It is easy to understand why man always divided his world into ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, anima meaning soul, the presence of which had to explain queer behavior. The most basic rule of inanimate nature is that it tends toward equilibrium which is at the maximum of entropy and the minimum of free energy. As shown so delightfully by Schrodinger in his little book What is Life? (1945), the main characteristic of life is that it tends to decrease its entropy. It also tends to increase its free energy.”

“In my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all. Somewhere along the lines, life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps [back to the cell].”

Top: an image from Asim Kurjak and J.M. Carrera’s 2006 chapter “The Beginning of Human Life”, wherein Albert Szent-Gyorgyi’s 1940s “life, as such, does not exist” statement is cited, as a platform to digress on possible legal and religious implications of the fetus. [10] Bottom:a 1993 article snippet, in Liberty: a Magazine of Religious Freedom, citing Szent-Gyorgyi’s startling statement: “life, as such, does not exist”. [9]

“Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Nobel laureate discoverer of Vitamin C, startled his readers when he wrote: ‘Life, as such, does not exist.’ He explained: ‘What we can see and measure are material systems which have the wonderful quality of...”

“Some authors say that life as such does not exist—no one has ever seen it. Szent-Gyorgyi says that the noun ‘life’ has no significance because there is no such thing as ‘life’. Le Dantez holds that the expression ‘to live’ is too general, and that it is better to say that a dog ‘dogs’ or a fish ‘fishes’ than a ‘dog or a fish lives’.”

“Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who discovered vitamin C, scandalously declared that life does not exist. Following upon this ‘good news’ announced by Szent-Gyorgyi, my entire approach consists in putting a few more nails in the coffin—and in recognizing, in effect that life does not exist as such, at least not as an object of scientific investigation, since its mechanisms can be entirely reduced to chemical interactions.”

“Life does not exist as an explicative notion of organic properties … life does not exist as an object of biological research.”

“When Szent-Gyorgyi made the somewhat abrupt declaration: “life as such does not exist”, in all likelihood he was not doubting his daily experience. I do not think I betray him in thus clarifying his words: life does not exist as an explicative notion of organic properties. I other words, life does not exist as an object of biological research.”

A 2015 Yahoo Answers query (Ѻ) about Thims’ version of the “life does not exist” view; found by Thims while key term searching, on 18 Apr 2016, for “Libb Thims, atheist”, after watching the 2015 Dave Rubin interview (Ѻ) of Sarah Haider, and adding her to the top 200 atheists list (#146).

“You agree with me that the single atom is not alive. What about two atoms? What about three? Does a bound state of atoms have to have a certain movement to be considered alive? What if we heat a system of four atoms, do they suddenly become alive? What if we subject a system of atoms to both gravitational and electromagnetic forces, does that suddenly make them alive? What if the two forces act to move smaller atoms through the cavities of larger atoms [molecules] on a cyclical basis, thus activating reactions [metabolism] in the process, does that make them alive? What if the two forces begin to arrange the atoms into hierarchies, and that smaller atoms and bundles of atoms begin to more between the hierarchies, does that make them alive? What if a structure of atoms, begin to turnover their internal atoms, with those of the surrounding space, on a cyclical basis, does that make it alive? It should be very obvious that no matter how many atoms one adds to the argument that an atom or a structure made of two or more atoms cannot be alive.”

“Life does not exist in the sense that life is not absolutely different from non-life. The difference between life and non-life is like the difference between plants and animals. A recent article in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that bacteria locked in Antarctic ice for 100,000 to 8-million years resumed growing when given warmth and nutrients. Could they have been alive for all that time? Could any life processes been going on for that period? If not, can a living thing spend an intermittent part of its life as a non-living thing? I think this is incongruous with life and non-life being absolutely different. During the frozen period all the conditions for life, including the DNA existed, but life did not exist. More commonly many seeds remain viable for many years under certain conditions. They go through a life cycle in part of which they are not alive. Can a living thing be not alive during part of its life?”

“I believe our conception of what is living and what is not living has been based primarily on time and complexity. A mountain range may be considered to have a life cycle. It grows from relatively flat land to gigantic peaks, then returns again to near flatness. In the life time of man however nothing noticeable happens. The process takes hundreds of millions of years. Man has never conceived of a mountain range as living. Pre-civilized men have probably thought “Old Faithful”, the erupting hot spring to be alive because it shows dramatic movement, seemingly of its own volition. We have not considered this to be alive because we understand exactly how this happens. We have difficulty understanding how what we would now consider a chemical reaction could have evolved into the complete human writing this sentence because we are incapable of understanding the immense amount of time it took this to happen.”

Both Types of "Movement" neither of which are "alive".

“There is no essential difference between ‘life’ and ‘non-life.’ The perceived difference is complexity. Old Faithful (Ѻ) has ‘life-like’ movement but is easier to understand than a paramecium (Ѻ). The hydrogen atom is NOT alive.” — Alfred Rogers (2014), curator of LifeDoesNotExist.com, “Email communication to Libb Thims”, Nov 21

“Suppose that this hypothetical experiment could be realized, which seems not unlikely, and suppose we could discover a whole chain of phenomena [evolution timeline], leading by imperceptible gradations form the simplest chemical molecule to the most highly developed organism [human molecule]. Would we then say that my preparation of this volume [Anatomy of Science] is only a chemical reaction [extrapolate up], or, conversely that a crystal is thinking [extrapolate down] about the concepts of science?”

“The process by which lipid bi-layers formed phospholipids spontaneously into a cell membrane under conditions existing on early earth are not yet understood, but this would have happened 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. But even if the life cycle of these living things were a whole day there would have been 365 million cycles in only a million years, or 3.5 to 4 thousand times 365 million cycles until now. The tiniest random change would produce the complex single celled organisms we see today and similar random changes have converted the first multi-cellular animals to us.”

“Deep down among human intuitions is one that spontaneous movement means life. Our kith and kin among the animals entertain it as well as we, though for them ‘life’ is, of course, an unconceptualized thought. We know from ourselves that the indirect field of sight will see what moves when it fails to see what does not move. Our horse may shy at a blown leaf on the roadway, not at a still one. The frog snaps at a fly that moves, but not at one which is still. The vine-tendril never lives so vividly as when at the cinema its clasping speeded into visible movement. When the cardboard puppet dances it becomes thinkably alive, and Don Quixote’s irruption at the puppet-theater becomes intelligible. The biologist knows this intuitive inference as native, even to a primitive mind. Movement accepted as spontaneous implies living. And the motion of the planets seemed to be spontaneous. Their movement told men that they were alive. All stars might be alive, but of them all the planets most so. The other stars were ‘fixed’, that is, relatively to each other did not move.”

“If life does not exist, if the difference between life and non-life is only complexity, what about the value of human life? Is destroying human life no different than destroying a non-living object? No. If the last Stradivarius violin were to be identified we would value and protect it and care for it, because it would be something we could never replace. This is true of every human. Each of us is the result of a unique combination of DNA that cannot be replaced. Strangely, denying the existence of life would not change moral conceptions of valuing human life (and perhaps other life as well).”

American science journalist Ferris Jabr (2013) sees believes that his cat is not alive (compare: Schrodinger's cat), being that "life" is an invented concept, albeit one that does not hold up in the face of a world made of atoms and collections of atoms, whether animate or not, such as a moving cat or a moving K'Nex set. [1]

“Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.”

The discerning 1966 words of Francis Crick, who following vitalism debates with Michael Polanyi, and others, suggested: we should abandon the word "alive".