Scientific revolutionaries (and believers) like Galileo, Descartes and Newton established the pragmatically very useful separation of facts and values, mind and matter, which in technological terms allowed the West to kick-away from the rest, but also left us with a legacy of analytical thinking habits that are often quite shy about their limitations.
Hair-shirted atheists like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett aside, many intelligent people find a mechanistic explanation of life, the universe and everything somewhat unsatisfactory - which is why notions of non-physical interference (Vitalism, Deism, Spiritualism etc.) have continued to appeal. Indeed vitalism is the flip-side of atomism, both deriving from the original Cartesian sin of mind-matter dualism.
Vitalists add something to the laws of Nature to explain the missing bit they typically intuit, but in fact this isn't strictly necessary if you just stop thinking about the cosmos as a collection of parts. The missing ingredient could instead be the context, or as Fritjof Capra puts it, "an understanding of the organising relations"; as such requiring nothing outside of Nature other than an appreciation that the form and function of its parts are ultimately determined by the dynamics of the whole system.
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