For most of human history, it was obvious that life was of a higher order than matter, since the latter cannot be coalesced into the former.
An ignorant kind of scientism, narrow in focus, spent the last hundred years trying to rub out that basic truth and replace it with a system run by scientists, none of whom can make life but many of whom are very good at taking it away.
However:
> and replace it with a system run by scientists
is just bogus straw manning.
It's pretty obvious the emergence of life on earth wasn't part of a "system run by scientists", the comment you replied to talked of the very antithesis of hierarchical systems run by entities in the phrase "emergent property of underlying physical laws".
I'm not implying any kind of answer or intelligent design. We don't have an explanation for life and that's ok. But it clearly isn't the domain of science in its entirety.