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"Clearly, biological systems are more than matter in motion. If that were all they were, then how to explain their uncanny ability to maintain their distance from thermodynamic equilibrium for extended periods of time?"

It is not just an ability, it is a will ... living things have a will that inanimate things do not possess. This will is somehow connected to but not solely attached to the spacetime coordinate system of daily living in which thermodynamic events occur. The denial of this reality is what hallamrks God deniers, as they seek to establish a hard and fast rule that there is no thing beyond this realm in which they can measure thermodynamic events.

Upon death of an organism, the individual 'ism' appears to leave the spacetime coordinates of its physical manifest. But the cells or organs of that 'organ ism' have yet to fall fully under imperious thermodynamic equilibrium. The coordinate system of thermo equi is a spacetime phenomenon in which the Physics and Chemistry of physical life occurs (euphemistically known as three dimensions of space and one of time).

The leaving that the organism does is not solely a spacetime phenomenon as we describe spacetime. It occurs via a coordinate system which is connected to/interacting with but not the same as that of the Physics and Chemistry of thermodynamic equilibrium.

The indirect evidence of this reality may be found in near death experiences, which are real. The data which is acquired during such an event, when shared upon return to this coordinate system, evidences a reality which is much greater than our perceptions coordinates.

As a Christian, I am absolutely convinced that the miracles Christ performed/performs are accomplished via interaction between another coordinate system and that of our physical bodies. That a man has a will can be easily illustrated with one scene: a man chooses to starve himself to death even with abundant food offered and available to him. Making that choice is evidence of his will. Were he merely a physio-chemical thing, consumption (staving off theromodynamic equilibrium) could not be thwarted by his choice.

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!

I've shared this link before, but some here might be interested in a view by P.S. Wesson (one of my favorite geometric physicists) - namely that death may simply be a phase change:

We review the idea, due to Einstein, Eddington, Hoyle and Ballard, that time is a subjective label, whose primary purpose is to order events, perhaps in a higher-dimensional universe. In this approach, all moments in time exist simultaneously, but they are ordered to create the illusion of an unfolding experience by some physical mechanism. This, in the language of relativity, may be connected to a hypersurface in a world that extends beyond spacetime. Death in such a scenario may be merely a phase change.

Time as an Illusion

...living things have a will that inanimate things do not possess. This will is somehow connected to but not solely attached to the spacetime coordinate system of daily living in which thermodynamic events occur. The denial of this reality is what hallmarks God deniers, as they seek to establish a hard and fast rule that there is no thing beyond this realm in which they can measure thermodynamic events.

Yep. These dudes really have got themselves trapped into a truth-suffocating intellectual box of their own making. Good luck to them, this class of highly-educated moral morons who, because they consider themselves the "brights," are just "naturally determined," on Darwinian grounds I imagine, to rule the rest of us, whom they call the "dims".

[At least as Richard Dwkins and Daniel Dennett imagine it, in their "hands-across-the Pond" assault on Christianity.... This is a public fact.]

The hard and fast box into which these moral morons have gotten themselves entrapped is the idea that only those events in Reality that can be directly observed and measured count as "real."

The next step is to say that entities subject to the second law of thermodynamics definitely qualify as "real" — because they are measurable in terms of observable thermodynamic effects. [Talk about "circular reasoning!"]

Well, if all you want to do is explore the problems of "heat death," then have a good time with such intellectual prescriptive offerings!!!

What does anything of this have to do with the question: "What is Life?" Isn't that supposed to be the main inquiry of the biological sciences? Or am I just a naive person?

The classical term for a thinker committed to this reductive propensity of thought is idiotes [Cicero]; or nabal [Hebrew scripture]. "Nabal" translates as: "The man who says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" In Cicero, idiotes translates as: The man who refuses to apperceive Reality: He is the man who embodies the character of aspernatio rationalis, of "contemptuous disdain for reason."

Nowadays, practically no one understands such insights, nor the concerns for personal and social order that they implicate.

Anyhoot and whatever. I do believe you are entirely correct in thinking that there is a companion coordinate system engaging the three-of-space-and-one-of-time dimensional model which enjoys so much currency in contemporary science. Notwithstanding the revolutions of relativity and quantum theory of the past century. Whatever these theories proposed, their import apparently is still largely undigested by the biological scientific community at large nowadays.

But I do believe you show a "direction" into which the scientific community might move to break the shackles of reductionism, and actually "get somewhere" in the real, that is to say truthful, understanding of the natural world....

Thank you ever so much, dear brother in Christ, for sharing your wonderful, thought-provoking insights!!!