It is appropriate to examine the profound questions like what is Life, how did it originate, what is the purpose of life, why we die, is there life after death etc from an alternate angle, not based on faith like religious views on afterlife, soul, day of judgment etc is, nor based on armchair philosophy weaving a tapestry of verbiage, but based on the hard earned insights gained through scientific observations and scientific thinking that has revolutionaized and continues to revolutionize our worldview and paradigms. It must be understood in clear terms that scientific insights are consensus based as they are rooted in objective evidence and rational thinking and hence crosses cultural, religious and racial boundaries, not the product of any specific culture or bias. These are old questions although the meaning of the questions (and of course the answers) have changed over the years in view of a wealth of insights gained thanks to the revolutionary way scientific thinking has changed human perceptions and knowledge and the remarkable discoveries and insights that it has led to and is still leading to. To briefly phrase the best known scientific answer today in scientific jargon : "Life is a dissipative structure that has achieved the threshold of complexity to become an autopoietic system operating on the edge of chaos, capable of evolution via variation and natural selection". A dissipative structure is a far from thermodynamic equilibrium system that tends to maintain it's identity by ccyhannelizing a continuous flux of energy through it. Living systems accomplishes this by absorbing the high grade solar energy, decreasing its own entropy (Or increrasing its local order), but releasing more enetropy to the environment through low grade heat energy and thus decreasing the overall order of the universe. Autopoietic systems are autonomous and self-generating systems, i.e they can make copies of themselves without an external agent by autocatalytic process and transducing energy from the environment. The underlying purpose of life is to to faithfully obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics by increasing universe's entropy. Even eating and sex are dictated by this requirement, although our brain translates it into a sense of desire and pleasure for us, causing us to replicate, hiding the real underlying purpose from our conscious mind. So the purpose of life, viewed from level above that of the laws of thermodynamics, is to make more life of the same kind. Our desire to live, mating urge, hunger is nothing but a higher level manifestation of that purpose rooted ultimately in the laws of physics at work at the cell level. Why do we die? In short because we (i.e most plants and animals) have inherited through evolution death genes from our protist (single celled organisms with nucleus) ancestors who took to sexual reproduction as a better evolutionary survival strategy in tough primitive environments. Death is brought about in a programmed way (called programmed cell death or apoptosis) by certain genes (death genes). Those few life forms (bacteria) that did not and still do not reproduce sexually are immortal, barring accidental deaths (like antibiotics). Death is the price that higher life forms pay individually for the better survival strategy of their species. Without death harmful mutations would have been passed on to the offsprings without limit and potentially destroyed the species as a whole. Now let me try to address the most complex question of how life originated by outlining it in 5 steps that reflect the current scientific insight. I must emphasize that there still remains a mystery, the ultimate one (denoted by "?" in the following) which we will never know, because that truly belongs to the category of the unknowable.

The first step in the creation of life is the occurrence of Big Bang and the existence of the Laws of Physics as represented below:

The second scenario is due to some versions of Cosmology which derives Big Bang as a consequence of laws of physics (Quantum Cosmology). Anyway, we can say for sure that there IS an ultimate mystery, since we don't know from where did the Laws of Physics (Quantum Field theory to be precise, which is at the bottom of ALL laws of Physics) came from, or why is there a law of physics? Strong atheists believe that there is no "?", laws of Physics are the ultimate reality, self-caused, there is nothing beyond our phenomenal world. In other words they claim that "?" is NOT unknown, but it is known and is = NULL, i.e nothing. That is as much a belief as it is to assert that "?" is not NULL, that there must be "something" above the laws of Physics, being the cause of it. But to believe that "?" is not NULL in itself does not mean theism, because theism is a cognitive assertion that asserts "?" = THIS (Replace "THIS" with the God of each religion), but to say that ? is "something" unknown is a noncognitive statement. Anyway, we don't need to go any further into this metaphysical issue for the rest of the discussion.

   Now to go to the next step, let us first state an important scientific insight: That the laws of chemistry are rooted in the Laws of Physics, and the laws of Biology are in turn rooted in the laws of chemistry and to the laws of Complexity, i.e Emergent Laws, in particular the laws of non-equilibrium thermodyamics in the context of life's origin:

Laws of Physics ---> Laws of Chemistry + "Laws of Complexity" ---> Laws of Biology

Let me cite some quotes of in support of the above scientific insight, as it is not possible for me to list all the scientific facts of each area to justify this view, except to note that most chemistry books devote their first few chapters on the physics of atoms and molecules, and most biology books devote their first few chapters on organic chemisrty. Nobel Laureate Watson of DNA fame said "In the last analysis, there are only atoms. There's just one science, Physics; everything else is social work" in his lecture at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1985. This view is also echoed by Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg. Hawking nicely summarizes this view as: Biology->Chemistry-> Physics, in the book "The Large, the Small and the Human Mind". Steven Weinberg says in his book "Facing Up", p-22-3: "No biologist today will be content with an axiom about biological behaviours that could not be imagined to have a more fundamental level. That more fundamental level would have to be the level of Physics and chemistry, and the contigency that the earth is billions of years old". Biologist Richard Dawkins (in "The Blind Watchmaker") states that Physicists have to come into the scene at the end of the long chain of reasoning to explain evolution of life to complete the last but not the least significant step. Molecular Biologist Frankln Harold says in his wonderful book "The Way of the Cell", p-4: "We have ample reason to believe that every biological phenomena, however complex, is ultimately based on chemical and physical interactions among molecules" and reinforces this in his epilog : "The bedrock premise of this book book is that life is a material phenomenon, grounded in chemistry and physics. Physicist Heinz Pagels wrote in his book "The Dreams of Reason", p-49: "Biological systems are extremely complex Quantum mechanical entities functioning according to well-defined rules". As a final example renowned biologist Earnst Mayr wrote in his book "The growth of Biological Thoughts ('82): "Every biologist is fully aware of the fact that molecular biology has demonstrated decisively that all processes in living organisms can be explained in terms of Physics and chemistry"(As cited in Weinberg,"Facing Up", p-19)

NOTE: It is not known if the Laws of Complexity, the Emergent Laws as shown above are independent laws or follow from the basic laws of Physics. Most reductionist scientists believe that they are indeed the consequences of the Laws of Physics, others like Nobel Laureate Chemist Ilya Prigogine, late Biologist Robert Rosen, and physicist Paul Davies take a holistic view and think that they are additional laws of nature, that cannot be reduced to the laws of physics, they exist of their own. Ilya Prigogine takes the view that emergent laws start at the top and work downwards (Complex to simple), whereas laws of Physics start at the bottom and work upwards (simpler to complex systems), meeting somewhere at the middle where life (or any dissipative structures) emerges. Prigogine got Nobel prize in 1977 for explaining and discovering dissipative strutures, of which life is the prime example. It is the emergent laws of complexity that is the cause of self-organization, a characteristic of life. However the Laws of Complexity have not been actually derived from the Laws of Physics, even if they were rooted in them as the reductionsists believe, due to the sheer complexity of the number of molecules involved. But it is important to realize that both viewpoints share the common belief that biology is a result of material process, i.e a product of natural laws.

Now let me outline the remaining steps leading to the "mystery" (rather the unsolved problem of life):

2. In step 2, simple matter was created after the Big Bang due to the action of the Laws of Physics (Quantum Fluctuation:

Big Bang --> Laws of Physics --> Simple Matter (atoms, simple molecules)

3. In step 3 simple matter is again subjected to the laws of Physics to form Composite matter (Complex molecules) whose behaviour is now described by Laws of Chemistry:

Simple Matter + Laws of Physics --> Composite matter (Laws of Chemistry)

4. In step 4, composite matter is subjected to Laws of chemistry + the laws of complexity (i.e Chemical evolution) to form living molecules (Self replicating molecules) and primitive organisms, governed by laws of biology:

Composite Matter + Laws of Chemistry + "Laws of Complexity" ---> Cells, primitive organism. ( Laws of Biology )

5. In step 5, primitive organisms are subjected to Laws of Biology and laws of complexity (i.e Biological Evolution) to form higher (complex) organisms:

Primitive Organism ---> Laws of Biology + Laws of Complexity (Biological Evolution)
---> Advanced Unicellular/Multicellular Life.

It is important point to note that above is a very high level flow diagram. The details for each arrow are incredibly complex, there are unsolved problems galore, and thats where scientists are working hard on filling out the details, and the complete mechanism of the origin of life is not known yet, but again, that is a scientific problem, not a metaphysical one, and is in principle scientifically solvable, we are getting closer and closer to the solution. In fact the problem of the origin of life is not that there is not any satisfactory theory, but that there are too many possible theories. The laws of Science only impose some constrains on what the theories can be, but it does not uniquely select and decide which theory is the correct, since all these theories are plausible explanations of life. The fact that we do not completely understand life yet does not imply that it is not understandable in physical terms. We don't understand weather too, in spite of all the technical advances. This lack of understanding is rooted in the complexity of both weather and life. The chain of reasoning based on laws of physics that links a simple molecule to a living organism is broken in the middle due to the enormous complexity of cumulative effects of historical contingencies that are acted upon by the laws of complexity, over billions of years of evolution. In weather, it is the enormous number of air molecules that is at the root of complexity preventing an exact understanding. Anything after the "?" (i.e after the Big bang) is within the domain of science (Phenomenal world), and we can only talk about unsolved problems, not mysteries within this domain.

Life is an EMERGENT behaviour of matter. Life is a result of self organization of matter driven by the requirements to maximize entropy by reducing the gradient of temperature difference between sun and earth. Life is not simply an entity created from scratch from conception to birth. Life is an evolving process that has been going on over billions of years in an incremental way. Our body may have been formed in matter of years after conception, but the program (our genome sequence) that builds us (our body+mind) has taken billions of years to perfect. The most insightful discovery by Darwin was that natural selection and mutation can give rise to a complex life form as human through a prolonged and cumulative action of those laws. The complicated body and brain of ours are not just a creation from our birth to date. We have inherited the blueprint of life (the genetic code) that has evolved and perfected through billions of years of evolution. That's why life is so precious. It contains huge information collected over an incredibly long span of time. Our genome sequence will take thousands of pages to write down in paper. Like a complex software that starts with few simple lines but eventually is perfected into a sophisticated program of millions of lines with contributions from many people over a long time, the genetic code of life and the genome took billions of years to be developed and is still evolving. Life will look different and more advanced in another million years. We can never understand life without understanding the history of how life has evolved from the primordial earth with single cells giving way to more and more complex organisms by incremental steps. But the process of this evolution of life from simple to complex is purely natural. Down at the bottom it is nothing but physics. Natural selection and mutation is nothing more than a manifestation of the laws of Physics at work at the most findamental level of matter.

One may say that creation of a complex thing must be due to intelligent design, not just blind laws of physics. This is an analogy from life where we see humans (intelligent being) design complex things like watches. But humans employ the same laws of Physics to design complex things. And even laws of Physics without intervention from humans can design beautiful things, like snowflakes, flowers etc. Humans themselves are product of laws of physics, so even human designs are ultimately designs of laws of physics. Only that we don't know the "designer" of the laws of Physics (The ultimate mystery). We don't even know how to meaningfully frame the question at this extreme level.

Now coming to the common question of what is death, and what happens just after death, when nothing seem to be different in the body just before and after, what is "missing" and where did "it" go? The first question is a scientific question, not a metaphysical one. Lets take an analogy. Say you have a music tape. When you play it in a player it plays beautiful music. Now say accidentally someone pushed the record button with no input, so the entire music gets erased. When you play the same tape again, no music will be heard. The tape looks the same. What is missing from the tape, "where" did "it" go? I am sure this doesn't provoke a metaphysical question in one's mind. The case of the death of human, or any animal is not much different. Just as in the erased tape, many individual tiny magnetized particles were oriented in an ordered pattern before the tape was erased, and lost their orientations after, the cells in the human were alive before death, and dead aftre the death of the human. A cell is alive when it is metabolism, and dead when it ceases to. The brain cells of dead human all die (loses metabolism) first, then slowly the cells of other organs decay, due to the lack of oxygen. Cells in the organs like eye, body limbs die slowly, so if they are removed promptly before decay starts and preserved, they can be reused by other human, just as the parts of a computer whose CPU is damaged can be reused in another computer. Is there a soul? That is a vague concept, fraught with logical absurdities. All we have is mind/consciousness, which is the emergent effect of the brain cells in live action, much like the music in a tape which is the effect of the complicated magnetic patterns in it being passed through a magnetic head. Stop the tape, and the music stops too. Mind/consciousness is like music playing due to the trillions of cells in human brain running the genetic code tirelessly. Each individual life has not much significance to the universe or to "?". The only significance of each life is in maintining continuity, a link between its predecessor and its successor. The notion of soul is completely created by our desire for immortality. As grim as it may sound, there is not even a logically consistent DEFINITION of soul, let alone its existence, beyond the physical body (specially brain). Is there life after death? Some questions need to be answered first before even trying to answer that. How can one define life AFTER death to begin with? If that new Life after death must require the same material body then what age should that body be? What if someone dies at age 6. Will he/she continue life after death or be resurrected at 6? What if someone dies at 90? Will he/she be resurrected at 90? Will the resurrected body age again? If not then what is the meaning to be alive at 90 forever or at 6? Finally does the life after death need not require a body, if so, what does it mean to be alive without a body? Unless one can answer these questions, the vague concept of Life after death will be a reflection of the refusal to accept death as a permanent destruction of one's body and brain. All scientific and logical reasoning points to an absurdity of resurrection in the way humans wish to look at it.

The only thing that can survive the body is some information (If it is saved), for example if tape is destroyed the same tape can be reconstructed (recorded), if the music itself is saved in say an .mp3 or .wave file. (Which is information). Likewise, for the human, it is the complete genome sequence + the complete neuronal configuration of the brain, taken together (Which is Information) that can survive beyond death, provided they are saved somehow. So If life/soul is DEFINED as it is the complete genome sequence + the complete neuronal configuration of the brain, then yes, souls exists and life can exist after death, just as a software program exists independent of the physical computer and even after the program has stopped running. While preservng the genome (i.e the sequence information) is within current technology, saving the complete neural connections is too formidable and beyond any conceivable biotechnology. But soul defined this way does not go anywhere, does not move, but stays as a potentia in the information space. One can conceive of immortality in this definition, through cloning. But while it may be possible to clone a human being (over and over again), to overcome mortality, since the brain of the cloned human can never be the same as the original human (because neuronal configurations are determined by environemtnal stimulus, besides genetic code, and environment will never be exactly same in each rerun of a genome sequence), true immortality is still not possible in the strict sense.

Some form of simulated resurrection of life (Virtual Immortality) is however, possible to envisage within scientific framework, not in the theological sense. This has been speculated by Physicist Frank Tipler in his book "The Physics of Immortality", based on some plausible assumptions in physics (like the universe has to start decelerating at some point), although latest observations point to an unlikely prospect for its coming true (scientifically), since the universe seems to be accelerating for ever. Tipler's theory (Called Omega Point Theory), has generated a cult of followers among the Transhumanists and Extropians who call themselves Tiplerians. Anyway, as mentioned before, the notion or the wish for Life after death is rooted in the human refusal to accept death as the ultimate termination of their identity. This fear of death and urge for immortality results from Self-Consciousness, a necessary attribute of human consciousness which makes us distinct from other species, who only possess primitive consciousness with only primary instincts of propagation, and avoiding dangers so as to successfully pass their genes to next generation. A "conscious" anxiety due to awareness of death, is a consequence of the growth of the neocortex area in human brain, which is not present in other mammmals. It is this Neocortex that has given rise to the intriguing consistency loop that is a thing of wonder to all scientists and philosophers :

Physical laws -> matter -> Life ->Consciousness -> Physical Laws.

In other words our minds and consciousness have discovered (through scientific methods) the very same physical laws that created it(consciousness) in the first place through creation of matter, life and evolution!

Now some historical perspective on the quest for the answer to the profound questions on life. The complete answer to the questions on life has not and will not be answered in one sweeping breakthrough or by one human in a finite time. The fundamental fact is that the answer lies in an incremental, cumulative approach to THE truth rather than a complete grasp of it. We can get closer and closer to the truth. A lot has been learned already. Very few of us laymen actually are aware of the rapid increase in understanding that has been going on. We only get a jolt when a flash of news are thrown at us, for example, cloning of the sheep Dolly, the completion of the human genome project, genetic engineering to increase longevity by tweaking telomeres in chromosomes, etc. It must be understood that saying that Life is the miraculous work of a Divine creator does not "explain" life, it only puts a closure to the quest for the answer and allows human to go about mundane pursuits so as not to be distressed by the failure to understand it. It is a common human instinct to put a closure to any unresolved questions due to a feelin of uneasiness to living with mysteries and unanswered questions. A scientific inquiry goes against this instinct to jump into a premature closure and strives to go deeper for further insights, incremental advance being the goal, not a closure necessarily. A genuine understanding involves a scientific study spanning across a host of disciplines. Every day a new insight is being added to the knowledge base and getting us incrementally closer to the final understanding. Quantum jumps of insight do occur in history. For example Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Mendel's theory of heredity and the discovery around 1903 that chromososmes in the cell are the containers of the Mendel's genetic unit or "gene", culminating most importantly in the legendary discovery of DNA structure in 1953 and deciphering of the genetic code in 1961. The experiments of Urey and Miller showed how chemical and physical process can create the ingredients of life if not life itself (as yet). These are facts of life that are universal and crosses all religious boundaries, unlike religious "explanations" of life. Although Darwin explained beautifully how life evolved from simple to the complex but only vaguely mentioned about a possible mechanism of the origin of life itself (The primitive pond). The first scientific attempt to understand the origin of Life was by the Russian scientist Oparin in his 1929 classic "The Origin of Life". He extended the Darwinian theory of evolution backward in time to explain how simple organic and inorganic materials might have combined into complex organic compounds and how the latter might have formed the primordial organism. The first attempt to understand life in a more fundamental way was by the nobel laureate physicist none other than the founder of quantum physics Erwin Schroedinger in his epoch making book "What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell With Mind and Matter written more than fifty years ago. He anticipated DNA and genetic code in that book even before its discovery. He called it some kind of aperiodic crystal, carrying hereditary information through some "codescript". Actually Schrodinger's idea itself was based on that of another brilliant Physicist turned biologist Max Delbruck, long before he received the Noble Prize in medicine in 1969. Although now dated, the book was a mark of amazing insight for its time. This book was the inspiration for all later generation biologists and physicists interested in life's mystery, like Watson and Crick who materialized their inspiration into discovering the structire of DNA, Schrodinger's aperiodic crystal, although the fact that DNA carries the genetic information itself was dicovered by Canadian biologist Oswald Avery in 1944. About half a century later another physicist from Princeton, Freeman Dyson improved upon Schrodinger's idea and wrote the book "Origins of Life". His ideas have been based on much more insights gained in Biology and Physics since Schrodinger and others. There has been a continued increase in our understanding of life and its origins by scientists all around the world since the milestone discovery of 1953. The next milestone was the discovery of the genetic code that the DNA of all life forms execute, first cracked by Nirenberg and completed by Har Govind Khorana for which they both received the Nobel Prize in 1968. One of the most creative of the scientists in the quest for the origin of life was the Sri Lankan born American chemist/biologist Ponnamperuma, who was the director of the laboratory of the chemical evolution of life at the University of Maryland until his premature death in 1995, and also the founder of the Third World Foundation, an organization dedicated to the promotion of scientific minds of the third world countries.. He along with Carl Sagan and Ruth Martiner was able to produce ATP, one of the fundamental building block of DNA, and thus of life. His insights into the chemical nature of life's evolution signifies a quantum jump from the days of Schroedinger and Oparin. Ponnamperuma said if God exists then he must be a organic chemist. He called HCN molecule "GOD molecule" because the intriguing way this molecule gives rise to more complex molecules of life. A nice article on the origin of life with some description of Ponnamperuma's work, as well as more discussion on the origin of life can be found at the site: http://www.rit.edu/~flwstv/biology. html. Another pioneer in life research is Nobel Laureate Eigen and chemist Orgel. Eigen was able to induce (chemically) RNA molecules to replicate in the lab. This is very close to producing a virus. Viruses are in between living and non-living. Two more pioneers that should be mentioned are Stuart Kauffman (A Biochemist) and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine (A physical chemist, whose name was mentioned earlier) both of whom have shown how order can spring out of chaos.

A caveat must be issued that it is never implied that Physics is complete and all that can be known is known already. There will certainly be insights gained in Physics and the laws of complexity, in future and current concepts and laws may be revised or subsumed under a more comprehensive scheme of laws (Theory of Everything). But it will not at least invalidate what is certainly known and tested today. Although human may not know the "?", they can still spend their lifetime learning and discovering the natural laws that exist and understand how it (Natural Laws) works and give rise to the marvelous phenomena of evolution, formation of stars, galaxies, snowflakes etc and try to understand life in an incremental way. If there at all one has to find any meaning of this finite life then the best candidate for meaning is the search to find the answers to how life has evolved and will evolve. This is the best use humans can make of their "gift" of consciousness, a gift since it was after all notrequired by evolution for survival, but came as a contingent by product of evolution. If one has to speak of teleology then I think it is best to say we have acquired consciousness so that we can explain how consciousness came about (The self consistency loop). Many top physicists, biologists, chemists (some Nobel laureates) are in the forefront of the research into the origin and evolution of life. Now they are being joined in this search by computer scientists (specially artificial life/intelligence people who view life as a software running on the hardware of human body. Some even believe that one day a fully conscious machine can be built!). We are witnessing an amazing synthesis of human knowledge and insights in the dawn of 21st century. Gone are the days when arm chair philosophers were idly talking about their pet theories of life, consciousness etc. Without the new language of genes, DNAs, entropy, Second Law, autocatalysis, autopoiesis any talk of life would now sound like childish babble, trapped in words going in circles, which can never add any new insight, only categorize already known observations. It would require a super philosopher today (There are a handful, Paul Davies, Daniel Dennett to name a couple) well versed in all these disciplines to pool together all these separate insights into a coherent story of life. Each insight or a specialist in that insight is but a link in a long chain. Individually they may not capture the whole truth, but half truths, but the links of half truths joined together may add up to the whole truth, or at least the best approximation to it. This is a sort of emergent law of truths. Individual pieces of truth all combining to yield a profound truth that is not visisble in any of those individual half truths.

Thousands of pages of results of scientific research into consciousness, mind, life are being published monthly in journals of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, biomathematics, biophysics, molecular genetics, artificial intelligence, quantum consciousness etc. The best approximations to date of the truth of life are distributed among these separate database of knowledge that is continuously expanding. As so aptly expressed by Biologist Frank Harold in "The Way of the cell" :

"What science knows of the nature of life, it owes to the labors of countless specialists---physicists and chemists, mthematicians and geologists, geneticists and biochemists and physiologists, biologists evolutionary and biologists molecular. The fruits of our labors are first inscribed in shelf upon shelf of prefessionsl journals, and subsequently reincarnated in textbooks that have grown too heavy to carry, let alone be read" (From preface p-x)

For us, not actively engaged in this quest, the only way to learn about the insights that have been achieved in the search for the answer to the question of life is through reading the tales told by scientists themselves or retold by philosophers of science. Evolution has been called the greatest story ever told. It may be frustrating to realize that despite reading enough in one's life time, one can still only hope to get a glimpse, a fraction of the whole truth. But learning about the truth is a journey, and its the journey, not the destination that should give meaning to our finite life.