Well, if by life the author means consciousness/awareness (not intelligence), I don't know that it is necessarily a religious assumption. Western orthodoxy assumes that consciousness arises out of complex arrangements of matter, yet it is different in kind and does not appear to be itself reducible to matter. Isn't it a simpler hypothesis to assume consciousness is the default state of the universe, and all material phenomenon are the result of conscious action? This problem is this hypothesis is that it removes us from our privileged position as masters of the universe.

The idea that I am just a small part in a giant conscious living system makes me feel good. The alternative - that we are islands of life that somehow different and separate from a dead, mechanistic universe - seems kind of unpleasant.