What are the limits within which life can exist? What are the limits of the natural sciences in explaining life and its origins?

The Limits of Life: 

Biology and the Philosophy of Nature

by William Carroll

Biology continues to offer us new and exciting insights into the world. These insights need to be integrated into a philosophical perspective that is richer than the reductive materialism that is often linked with the empirical sciences. In this endeavor, biology needs the philosophy of nature.

What are the limits within which life can exist? What are the limits of the natural sciences in explaining life and its origins?

I recently attended a fascinating lecture at Oxford on the existence of a variety of micro-organisms in what would seem an improbable environment: the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, which is the driest place on earth. Professor Rafael Vicuña, a distinguished biologist at the Catholic University of Chile, presented results of his research, which show how life has found ingenious ways to adapt to extreme conditions such as very low water availability, high salt concentration, and intense ultraviolet radiation.

This research is especially intriguing because the Atacama is seen as a terrestrial analogue for Mars. In fact, NASA is interested in the ways in which research in this desert might contribute to its astrobiology program. For some time, astrobiologists have been studying what are called extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme conditions. Do we get closer to understanding the origin of life the more we advance in our knowledge of life at its frontiers?

It is precisely such a question that is properly in the domain of the philosophy of nature. It would be of considerable benefit for biologists and other natural scientists to become acquainted with the insights this discipline offers. The philosophy of nature is a more general science of nature than any of the diverse empirical sciences. It depends upon the various natural sciences to understand nature, but the philosophy of nature concerns topics that are not specific to any one of the sciences, but common to them all: the nature of change and time, how physical entities are unities (as distinct from mere heaps of elements), and what the differences are between the living and the non-living.

What can the philosophy of nature tell us about investigating the origin of life? First of all, it can help us to avoid the errors in various philosophical claims about life and its origins. Questions concerning the nature of living thingsprecisely as living have currency, in part, because of the persistence in modern culture of various materialist, mechanist, and reductionist accounts of living and non-living entities that eliminate any real, qualitative distinction between the living and the non-living.

There are many who, by accepting a form of materialism and reductionism—that is, by insisting that living things are nothing more than the sum of their physical components—conclude that a question such as “What is life?” is, at the very least, not a biological question, and probably is best rejected as a question without content. So we hear that one ought to resist using the term “life” to describe what is just a highly sophisticated movement of matter. In an important sense, according to such a view, “life,” as something other than matter in motion, does not exist. Life, however, is more resilient than attempts to eliminate it as a category of scientific discourse, not to mention as a feature of nature!

In The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg, professor of philosophy at Duke University, tells us that the combination of contemporary physics and evolutionary biology offers an exhaustive account of everything that exists. He enthusiastically embraces “scientism” and its nihilistic consequences. Rosenberg claims:

If we accept evolution as the mechanism that gave rise to us, we understand that we are nothing more than a highly ordered collection of bio-molecules. Molecular biology has made fantastic strides over the last fifty years, and its goal is to explain all the peculiarities and details of life in terms of molecular interactions. A central tenet of molecular biology is that that is all there is.

For those scientists and philosophers who embrace some form of materialism, there is a strict disjunction: either we explain the living in terms of material, mechanically operating constituents, or in terms of some mysterious spiritual substance, some vital force. There is no substitute for materialism but magic, for there is no philosophical position other than materialism that is compatible with the science of biology. This is true, so the argument goes, because this mysterious substance, this vital force, yields itself even in theory to no method of investigation. Thus, it must be cast aside, leaving one with the inevitable conclusion that there is nothing more to living beings than their material parts.

The philosophical analysis that concludes that we must choose between materialism and vitalism, however, is based on a limited understanding of the options. Biologists and other natural scientists ought to avoid a philosophical interpretation of nature that reduces reality to the purely material and empirically observable.

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