The authors of this chapter have become convinced that a Kuhnian paradigm shift is afoot, not only in biology, but across the multiple scientific disciplines and methodologies relevant to the origin of life. Advances in complex systems science and the study of non-equilibrium thermodynamics have helped narrow the gaps between physics, chemistry, and biology, but many conceptual knots remain to be untangled. Indeed, making progress on the question of life’s origin may require a fundamental transformation of traditional conceptions of the relations among the sciences and their varying methods of explanation. …
The authors further affirm that continued progress in the effort to understand the place of life in the cosmos will require a transdisciplinary approach integrating the core insights and methodologies of not only astrobiology and philosophy, but also religious studies and theology. We value the freedom and autonomy of each of the special sciences to invent and test hypotheses unencumbered by the assumptions of other sciences (e.g., molecular biologists operate within a different paradigmatic context compared with evo-devo and systems biologists, etc.). We similarly insist upon the independence of science from theological orthodoxies (e.g., that life was designed and created from scratch by an omnipotent deity, or that the human soul is a supernatural substance existing in causal isolation from the rest of cosmic evolution). Scientific curiosity is to be checked only by the need for logical coherence and experiential adequacy (including ethical considerations). While metaphysics and theology have been “warned off the premises” of modern experimental laboratories, these ancient disciplines nonetheless retain an essential function in the effort to understand our cosmic origins. For one thing, philosophy and religion inevitably contribute to any final integration of scientific findings into a meaningful and motivating worldview for humanity at large. But even more significantly for natural science, metaphysics has a crucial role to play in shoring up science’s own epistemological and cosmological conditions of possibility. Whitehead asks: “What is there in the nature of things which leads there to be any science?” His answer is that trust in science requires a metaphysics explanatory of the insistent rationality of things. For Whitehead, cosmic rationality is a consequence of the inextricable causal entanglement of all things: “there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality.” Natural science thus assumes the universal communicability of the causal nexus across all scales of Nature. Science further presupposes that conscious organisms have arisen within this nexus who are capable of turning back to contemplate their own cosmic origins. It is imperative, then, that a way be found for scientific conceptions of physical causation, chemical reaction, and biological origination to hang together with our commonsense experience of conscious awareness and agency. For after all, if our consciousness is a total sham, then so are all our scientific inquiries and religious aspirations. Consciousness must somehow “[have] truck with the totality of things,” and it is the job of philosophy to critique and reconstruct the abstractions of the special sciences so as to recover a concrete sense of our connection with the cosmos as a whole. …
Matthew David Segall and Bruce Damer, The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis
