Looking at life

There is one thing very interesting about religion, almost every religion tries to explain the origin of the universe and (human) life. In fact I have come across some very interesting attempts by certain very religious individuals to refute Darwininian and other scientific theories, by adducing 'scientific' evidence to support their own cosmogonic and Genesis beliefs.
Well then what is life actually? it actually seems to be a configuration or pattern of matter which has achieved a sort of criticality, i.e. has crossed a certain threshold. A threshold of being able to preserve itself in a perpetually changing environment, of being able to replicate itself in a dynamically stable way, of being in some sense 'aware' of the environment around, of being self aware in different degrees, of being able to selectively give and take from the surroundings, of growth, and finally of the fantastic constancy and dynamic flexibility of the whole gamut of things afforementioned.
Also interesting is the fact that life begets life, or in other words such configurations cannot emerge independently other than being seeded by some living form, both in an evolutionary as well as causal sense. Except cloning, efforts of science to dabble with life have not been all that successful. The 'discovery' of the complete human genome has actually complicated issues by peripherally giving rise to 'intelligent design' theories, which are in essence counter-evolutionary.
On the other hand physics has also ended up tangled in its own web of questions of whether 'god' plays dice or not, or if the dice is a 'loaded' dice, and if so who/how/what loaded it? Any answer to the creation/genesis/evolution will also have to go back into the cosmogonic realm, and answer the ultimate question .... and beyond......?
Life is actually a set of great contradictions, a probabilistic nightmare; Paul Davis in his book ARE WE ALONE, draws an analogy of a storm entering an aircraft factory where spares are kept, and a complete aircraft emerging as a result, to be probabilistically equivalent of life emerging out of inert matter. One point of view is that probability does not operate in the reverse direction as assumed by many; many fantastically improbable events keep occuring in day to day happenings, but once they occur, it would be fallacious to retrace the improbability of occurance in the reverse direction. Thus the logic of probability applied to origin of life/beginning of universe, would fail in the reverse direction; see the analogy with the 'arrow of time'/entropy/phase spaces.
Relegion is also one of the arguments, let's not be prejudiced about it, who knows, the truth may be accessible to an entirely different method of questioning. The only 'bug' in the religious argument is that it's method of questioning is not consistent or internally sufficient, presupposes a lot, and using the same method one can prove the existance or otherwise of almost anything!
The 'criticality' of a lump of chemicals becoming life