Perhaps you missed the "I am not committed to either" part of Message 5.
I didn't miss it, but you were pretty clear that you're leaning
towards a position that I'm telling you, doesn't make any sense to me. Even if you were leaning away from it we'd still be talking about it because I don't see how it can even be one of the choices.
If you are committed to life magically popping into existence, then we will have to agree to disagree.
I'm not committed to life "magically popping into existence", and now I wonder where you got that I was. Again, I'm simply trying to arrive at clarity about your views. How do you have metabolism without catalysis, and how do you have biological catalysis without either enzymes or ribozymes? You insist that I'm overthinking it somehow, but these all seem like stupidly obvious questions to me. I'm wondering maybe if you didn't underthink it.
That allows a possible path for life to evolve out of spontaneously occurring chemistry.
Life certainly evolved out of spontaneously occurring chemistry, but it
wouldn't be life until the chemistry was controlled and not spontaneous. Right?
Maybe I'm just not making myself clear yet. Let's try some more questions. Start with the first living thing (in your view.) Now, trace back one step to its immediate predecessor which by definition is not life, so let's call it the "last proto-life." What kind of chemistry does the last proto-life do, and how does it do it?