> And when it comes down to it, I think it takes more faith to believe that life exists because of random chance than because of a creator. It seems like you'r

> And when it comes down to it, I think it takes more faith to believe that life exists because of random chance than because of a creator. It seems like you're being earnest here, so I'll respond earnestly and follow you totally off topic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're implying the following argument: if you uniformly randomly sample configurations of molecules, the probability of getting a living organism is so low as to be effectively zero. The problem with argument: life didn't emerge whole cloth from uniform random sampling. Rather, there was a bootstrapping process. The first step, which has been demonstrated in the lab, involves molecules randomly bumping into each other that happen to promote each other's production, e.g., auto-catalytic sets. These are simple proto-replicators: certainly not quite life, and certainly nothing like the complexity of a living cell. But they have the basic feature that they promote the creation of more copies of themselves. And once you have that feature—which we have seen can emerge from random collisions—you can get random, incremental improvements. For example, an auto-catalytic set of three molecules might run into a fourth that is mutually catalytic with the original three. And this incrementalism is the key to building up what we know as a living cell. Life can emerge slowly, bit by bit, starting from a proto-replicator, using occasional low-probability, but not impossibly low-probability, steps. Which is not to say that it's not still a big mystery as to where the universe with these convenient laws of physics came from (1). :) But once you have physics, life doesn't require as much faith as you're asserting. (1) but check out "More is Different" for one extra step in the chain of explanation (Anderson 1972): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372.2689&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372...