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Is chance capable of bringing life into existence?

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And the question people have debated for 200 years or more is,

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could life come about by processes like that?

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So if you just have atoms bouncing off of each other

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and nothing special being rigged by God could lead to the existence of life.

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And what's really, I would say, the trend over the last couple hundred years

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has been to see that the origin of life, the chances of that happening just by random processes

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are incredibly small, that the more we learn, the more fine-tuned we see everything in life being.

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And so there has been a project in physics, again, for the last 200 years

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to basically say, well, that's just because we don't know about the processes,

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but maybe there's some new laws of physics that would lead to life appearing by chance.

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In that case, they would say it wasn't really by chance.

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It was because of this unknown law of physics.

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In that case, they're not going on the basis of the data.

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They're going on the basis of what they want,

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which is they want to explain everything with just physical laws.

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And so I've talked to many people who are saying, in physics at least, who will say,

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we absolutely have no idea about the origin of life, but will hold out for some new law of physics

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that no one has ever discovered yet, because that's more appealing to me to think about that

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than to think about it just being a miraculous intervention by God.

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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.

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There was a long project of people trying to argue that it could come about.

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And so you may hear the phrases, emergent phenomena, pattern formation, spontaneous pattern formation.

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And these were attempts by people to say that just with known laws of physics,

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you could get the formation of life and so on.

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And for decades, people pursued these things.

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But I would say that field is pretty much dead as an explanation of the origin of life.

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They found a lot of interesting things, such as the appearance of snowflakes or the appearance of ridges in the clouds,

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things like this, but nothing near what you need to get the origin of life.

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As we've studied life more and more, we find that there's so many details that you just cannot get

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from spontaneous pattern formation that that project associated with Prigogine and other people

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has just been pretty much considered to not work.