Is chance capable of bringing life into existence?
And the question people have debated for 200 years or more is,
could life come about by processes like that?
So if you just have atoms bouncing off of each other
and nothing special being rigged by God could lead to the existence of life.
And what's really, I would say, the trend over the last couple hundred years
has been to see that the origin of life, the chances of that happening just by random processes
are incredibly small, that the more we learn, the more fine-tuned we see everything in life being.
And so there has been a project in physics, again, for the last 200 years
to basically say, well, that's just because we don't know about the processes,
but maybe there's some new laws of physics that would lead to life appearing by chance.
In that case, they would say it wasn't really by chance.
It was because of this unknown law of physics.
In that case, they're not going on the basis of the data.
They're going on the basis of what they want,
which is they want to explain everything with just physical laws.
And so I've talked to many people who are saying, in physics at least, who will say,
we absolutely have no idea about the origin of life, but will hold out for some new law of physics
that no one has ever discovered yet, because that's more appealing to me to think about that
than to think about it just being a miraculous intervention by God.
But at this point in time, I would say, the idea of just thermodynamic processes leading to life as we know it is almost impossible.
There was a long project of people trying to argue that it could come about.
And so you may hear the phrases, emergent phenomena, pattern formation, spontaneous pattern formation.
And these were attempts by people to say that just with known laws of physics,
you could get the formation of life and so on.
And for decades, people pursued these things.
But I would say that field is pretty much dead as an explanation of the origin of life.
They found a lot of interesting things, such as the appearance of snowflakes or the appearance of ridges in the clouds,
things like this, but nothing near what you need to get the origin of life.
As we've studied life more and more, we find that there's so many details that you just cannot get
from spontaneous pattern formation that that project associated with Prigogine and other people
has just been pretty much considered to not work.