Life, Origin of

One of the questions that has troubled humankind ever since it began to think about its position in the universe concerns its own origin and the origin of life in general. There are two basic alternatives for answering this question. Either we believe that life has a supernatural origin (such as being created by a transcendental God), or we think that the origin of life can be explained in a scientific way. This means that we try to describe an empirical scenario in which life originated through the workings of natural mechanisms. Here we are interested in the second alternative, but we must also say some words about the first one because the origin of life still is a problem about which religious, metaphysical, and scientific positions quarrel with each other.

Regarding the first alternative, speculating on a supernatural origin of life can be traced back to prephilosophical thought that is handed down to us by many orally transmitted and ethnologically collected myths of origin. The history of religions and metaphysics prolongs this mythical quest for origins. For example, the biblical Genesis reports that the world, all living beings included, was created by a personal God who himself is not part of his creation. Because the existence of such a transcendental creator is not an empirical fact that could be verified or falsified by scientific methods, the adequate cognitive attitude toward reports of creation like the biblical one is to either believe it or reject it for subjective reasons.

Nearly the same is true for metaphysical accounts of the origin of life. Metaphysics is a functional substitute of religion. It is the attempt of the human mind to develop a complete conceptual picture of the world that is structured by logical reasoning. To be complete, any metaphysical system must answer our question about the origin of life. The [Page 1475]speculative assumptions with which a metaphysics starts its reasoning are not of an empirical nature and impregnate all other metaphysical propositions with irrefutability because ad hoc explanations that agree with some metaphysical principle can be found anyway. Therefore, one must either believe a metaphysical system or reject it for subjective reasons that must be expressed in a coherent way.

For want of an empirical procedure of deciding which metaphysics is false, any metaphysical account of the origin of life, be it based on concepts such as entelechy (the Aristotelian tradition) or vital élan (the Bergsonian tradition), is not up to elementary standards of modern science that must be met if we want to follow the second way of answering the question about the origin of life: to describe an empirical scenario in which life originated by the workings of natural mechanisms.

Since the times of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, modern science has searched for an empirically based and mathematically expressible description of all natural phenomena, its living inhabitants included. The aim is to acquire intersubjectively checkable and systematic knowledge of mathematical relations between empirical phenomena. Modern science approaches its aim by making controlled and replicable experiments with isolated natural systems. Of course, it also relies on hypotheses that are not themselves empirically verifiable (such as the supposition that nature can be described mathematically). Yet this is no drawback because, altogether, those hypotheses demand that any specific scientific proposition must be falsifiable by empirical data.

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