What Is Life?
Two thoughts have been dancing in and out of my mind, 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: what was living is no longer alive.
Science has revealed much about the death of a cell and the processes of decay that follow. Yet these discoveries leave room for a broader question about the nature and meaning of life: 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 (Genesis 2:7). 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.
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 through life, and its departure is a powerful sign of death.
I do not think that what takes place with a cell in a laboratory is directly equivalent to the first man receiving the breath of life. To equate them would confuse two different kinds of explanation. Science can investigate the mechanisms by which living things function and the processes by which they die—the how. Genesis addresses a theological question about the ultimate source and meaning of life—the why. The two questions are different, but placing them beside one another can be illuminating.
There is something deeply arresting about the comparison. A scientist can observe the processes through which a cell dies and identify the signs that life has ended. Genesis invites us to consider the opposite: the entryway to life.
Neither perspective diminishes my wonder. Together, they deepen 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).
