How did it start?

We're talking about things that are much, much simpler and smaller than any living microorganism. What do you think the odds are that we would find fossils of it, especially since it wouldn't have any bones or hard parts? If the only thing that would convince you is that that can't possibly exist, then you're in a pretty invincible position of ignorance, wouldn't you say?

But not begotten in some fashion, like you said before? How do you propose we do that, construct a time machine?Why don't you get right to work on that.

Search for "minimal organism" and you can see what work has already been done in that field. The biggest obstacle to showing you something "obviously alive" is that nobody knows what the least complex "obviously alive" thing is.It's like adding yellow to blue paint, and wanting to stop at the first color that is "obviously green". How green is that, exactly? Could something be less green than that and still be green?

It should be, yes.If you want to help out, you could get a biochemistry degree and get to work.

Minds working to duplicate the effects of nature. The laws of physics don't change when you step into a laboratory, or when someone with a brain enters the room.If scientists, working through the laws of physics and chemistry, can create life, then we know that chemistry can create life. Intelligence isn't some magic force that we must infuse matter with to have life. When intelligence gets results by duplicating processes found in nature, we know that intelligence isn't necessary for the result.

I think that's quite erroneous. It's entirely possible to have living things with no particular drive, or even ability, to reproduce, errors or no. There's absolutely no inherent drive to reproduce or evolve in living things.But naturally, those that do not reproduce will not have any decendants, and so all living things are the decendants of those that did, for whatever reason, want to reproduce. By now the only living things that really have a chance to compete are those that need to reproduce. Did this make sense to you when you typed it? How could RNA "want" anything? The reason that it seems to you that RNA "wants" to survive is because the RNA that didn't survive isn't around for you to wonder about. The fossil record is a record of extinction; the history of life is a history of death. The organisms that did survive did so not because they wanted it more, but because they were lucky and won the life-lottery.RNA replicates because of the laws of chemistry. When you raise and release a stone, it doesn't "choose" to fall to the earth; the laws of physics demand it must be so. Similarly the laws of physics demand that RNA will replicate in the proper situation.

Women often have tubal ligations as a method of birth control. That doesn't mean they cease to be alive. And clearly they lack a "passion" to reproduce, or they would be doing so.At any rate I'm not aware that any formal definition of life exists in the first place.

How can movement be a property of life when so many organisms are sessile?

Well, when you called these "properties of life" that's not the impression you gave, now is it?What are the minimal properties that all living things share? None of the rest of the properties are relevant. Some living things are blue; we wouldn't say blueness was a property of life.

All sessile organisms do not move; that's what "sessile" means.

They might grow that way, but few trees have the ability to actually move.Consider lichens, or algaes, that have no moving parts at all, except perhaps cellular ones. But then even non-living objects are in motion at the atomic level. Beyond being pedantic, I think you're equivocating on the term "movement".But happy holidays, or whatever.

Fair enough. I propose that anything that can evolve via the mechanisms of natural selection and random mutation, and that experiences decent with modification, is alive. That would include virii. (A position that I believe I came around to in a discussion with Quetzal and others, a while ago.) Does it include prions? I don't know. They don't seem to evolve or change that much.

To test simply the accuracy of the Bible, I lit a bush on fire. I found I was quite unable to communicate with God in this manner. At this simple level, there is no evidence that the "book of Genesis" is anything but fanciful imagination.

Let's not. You're rightly identified my reasoning as simplistic; that was the point. Your so-called "test" proved nothing; it was simply a strawman.Just like mine, when I turned the same reasoning against you.