What Is Life?
Two thoughts have been dancing in and out of my mind this day, rather like those shifting lights in the northern sky. At first, they seemed separate, but gradually they began to illuminate one another. The first came from something the chemist James Tour said while discussing one of the most elementary yet mysterious boundaries in nature. Consider a single cell that has just died. Its molecular machinery and structures do not simply vanish at the moment of death, yet something fundamental has changed. Tour asks the wonderfully simple question, ‘When a single cell just dies, what is it we just lost?’ (Tour, 2024). It is a question that has stayed with me, because what was living is no longer alive.
Science can tell us an extraordinary amount about what happens when a cell dies. It can describe the breakdown of membranes, the failure of energy systems, changes in chemical reactions and the gradual collapse of the intricate machinery of the cell. Yet the sight of that dead cell can still provoke a deeper and more ancient question: what is life?
That question takes my mind back thousands of years to the language of Genesis. We are told that God forms Adam from the dust of the ground, the adamah, and then breathes into him the breath of life. The human being then becomes what the Hebrew text calls a nefesh chayyah, a living being. “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7, BSB). There is something profoundly simple about the picture. The material from which Adam is formed belongs to the earth, but when God gives the breath of life, that formed matter becomes a living human being.
The Hebrew word nefesh is particularly interesting here. It is often translated as ‘soul’, but that English word can easily make us imagine an invisible spiritual object being placed inside a physical body. The biblical idea is richer than that. Nefesh can refer to a living being, a person, a life, or the living self. Genesis does not simply say that Adam received a nefesh as though it were an additional component inserted into him. It says that Adam became a living nefesh. The whole creature is now alive.
There is also something beautiful about the biblical language of breath. Genesis 2 uses the Hebrew word neshamah for the breath of life, while another important Hebrew word, ruach, can mean wind, breath or spirit. They are not the same word and should not simply be treated as interchangeable, but together they belong to a biblical vocabulary in which breath and life are intimately connected. Anyone who has stood beside someone taking their final breaths understands why this imagery has such enduring power. Breath accompanies us into life and its departure marks the boundary of death.
I do not think that what happens in a modern laboratory scientifically proves the account in Genesis. That would confuse two different kinds of explanation. Science can investigate the mechanisms by which living things function and the processes by which they die. Genesis is addressing a deeper theological question about the ultimate source and meaning of life. The two questions are different, but placing them beside one another can be illuminating.
I find the comparison intriguing. A scientist can look at a cell whose physical constituents remain but whose life has gone, while the ancient writer of Genesis invites us to imagine the movement in the opposite direction: the material of the earth is formed, God gives the breath of life, and what was dust becomes a living being. The laboratory examines the extraordinary machinery through which life operates; Genesis asks us to consider why there is life to operate that machinery at all.
The more we learn about living things, the more astonishing their organisation appears. We can identify molecules, study proteins, read genetic information and observe intricate networks of chemical reactions. These discoveries do not diminish the wonder of life; for me, they deepen it. We can describe with remarkable precision many of the processes occurring within a living cell, yet the fundamental distinction between living matter and the same matter after death remains philosophically compelling.
Perhaps this is why the ancient image in Genesis still speaks so powerfully. It does not offer us a biochemical account of life's mechanisms; it never was intended to. Instead, it gives us a picture of dependence: the human being is made from the ordinary material of the earth, yet life itself is received as a gift. The dust does not possess life independently; it lives because life has been given to it.
Standing imaginatively between the laboratory and that ancient Hebrew text, I find myself returning to the same deceptively simple question: what is life? Science continues to give us increasingly remarkable descriptions of how living systems work, and we should treasure those discoveries. Genesis asks us to look beyond mechanism to source and meaning, and answers in the language of breath, earth and gift. Humanity is formed from the dust of the ground, God breathes the breath of life, and the creature becomes a living being.
References
Tour, J. (2024) ‘The shocking truth about life’s origins’, interview with E. Huffman, Maybe God Podcast, 26 December. Available at: Maybe God website (Accessed: 21 September 2026).
Berean Bible Translation Committee (2023) Berean Standard Bible. Available at: Berean Bible (Accessed: 21 September 2026).