There are fundamentally two possible explanations for the origin of life in the universe. One is that life arose through the fortuitous conflation of natural forces, chemical principles and sheer chance unaided by any intelligent input. The second is that life is somehow the product of intelligent agency.
The problem with the first is that it's so astronomically improbable that unguided processes could somehow produce the information necessary to construct a living, reproducing cell that it seems absurd. It's like believing, in Fred Hoyle's famous metaphor, that a tornado sweeping across a salvage yard could leave in its wake a fully functional 747 jet airliner.
This is an extremely difficult problem for metaphysical naturalism, the view that nature and its laws are all that exists, but all is not lost. Perhaps the probabilistic resources required for such an amazing feat as naturalism posits can be found in the multiverse.
In other words, if there are an infinity of salvage yards and an infinity of tornadoes eventually one will leave a jet plane in its wake, just as if you're dealt enough hands of cards eventually you'll get a royal flush. Or to use a more familiar metaphor, if an infinite number of monkeys are set to hammering away blindly on an infinite number of computers, eventually one of them will churn out the complete works of Shakespeare.
This is the naturalist's conviction, and although it's logically possible, it's so fantastically improbable as to place it beyond the credulity of not only those of common sense but even of most philosophers.
The mere logical possibility of such a prodigy does little to establish confidence in its having happened, so some have cast an envious glance at some form of intelligence as the cause. The problem with this is that it immediately raises the prospect of you know Who, and that's one solution that any dutiful metaphysical naturalist adamantly refuses to consider. Eyes shut, fists clenched, as C.S. Lewis once put it, the metaphysical naturalist would rather be burned at the stake than seriously entertain that possibility.
Even so, the evidence for design is powerful, so maybe intelligent engineering could be invoked in the origin of life without having to allow a divine foot in the door. So, ever resourceful, scientists and philosophers have come up with a pair of possibilities.
One is that life on earth is just a computer simulation designed by some very advanced life form in some other universe. This, however, is just a version of the multiverse gambit, since it assumes the existence of other universes, and in addition to the problems inherent in the multiverse hypothesis - namely the lack of evidence for the hypothesis and the inability to put it to any meaningful test - it simply pushes the problem back a step. If there are other universes with intelligent beings in them, how did those beings arise?
Moreover, it's not at all clear that conscious experience, i.e. the sensations we have of pain, pleasure, sound, color, etc., could be simulated by a computer.
The second possibility is something called panpsychism. It's the belief that the intelligent agent is the universe itself. On this view every particle of matter has at least a rudimentary consciousness and that if matter is aggregated together in just the right pattern and amount it'll reach a critical mass at which point consciousness arises, the universe becomes conscious and intelligent and proceeds to design life somewhere within itself.
As far as I'm aware these possibilities pretty much exhaust the philosophical landscape when it comes to accounting for the origin of life and the presence of the enormous amount of functional information contained in each cell of any living organism. Life originated as a result of either a blind stroke of incredible luck, a computer simulation originating in some other world, universal, panpsychic consciousness, or God.
The only way the last option can be adjudged to be less likely than any of the others is if it's decided apriori that God doesn't exist, but that assumption, of course, begs the question. Whether God exists, or whether His existence is more probable than any of the alternative explanations for life, is precisely what's at issue.
You can read more on the state of origin of life research here or you might be interested in this video which discusses what scientists mean when they talk about functional information in a living organism:
