Birch, Charles. Biology and the Riddle of Life. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999.

Abstract

What is life? What does it mean to be alive? Is the Earth a super-organism? Is God necessary? In Biology and the Riddle of Life Charles Birch confronts these fundamental questions at a time when such topics as genetic engineering, cloning, and ecology have been prominent in the news. Birch confronts the impression that modern biology has answers to all that there is to be known about life. He argues that while biology has had an impressive history of explaining the objective aspects of life, it has been unable to deal with subjective phenomena. We need to move towards an understanding of living creatures as subjects , and not only as objects, in order to probe life's hidden secrets - what it is to be alive, what it is to experience pain, and what it is to be in love. The answer must include the meaning of life for us as individuals. Birch proposes a new perspective to bring subject and object together. This is the black box he has opened. Biology and the Riddle of Life makes a significant contribution to a growing awareness that individual entities from protons to people should not be thought of as solid matter but as events or processes. Birch shows that viewing the world as a realm of experience rather than one of objects can lead to a naturalistic understanding of God that is very different from the interventionist supernatural God of much religion.