Come on, that's the most unconvincing take, self creating life, really? How utterly improbable that a universe gets constructed and somehow imposes upon itself natural laws and limits to exact degrees. Then it builds habitable planets and life forms perhaps in the form of a replicating RNA which has the imperative to evolve all the way to a conscious human and there's nothing to see here?
And this is what, an accident, a bit of good fortune. Nothingness forms a universe, life and that life then has the capacity to evolve no less all the way to a being with the capacities of a human. I know you are determined to fight the good fight to eliminate the God of religion, but surely you are open minded enough to see the improbability of all this happening via some accidental, material process.
I appreciate you challenging the friends because of some of there religious beliefs but don't fall into their trap of ending up with a fundamentalist belief regarding materialism. The only natural state in nothingness and let's say that a universe can accidentally form, which is impossible, and the most rudimentary expression of life appears then that life would not evolve into anything other than some version of itself in a system without purpose and will.
I understand our needs and wants, they are irrelevant. The story is about how and why a universe exists with such degree of exactitude beyond which it does not exist, (and don't start to write a religious type excuses here to substantiate how such a universe exists at all) it then produces life and why then does that life have the capacity to become a conscious human.
This can not be explained by siting natural processes even though natural processes have been employed in developing life to the degree of the human. The attributes you attribute to nature are subject to the will and purpose of an external agency.
