Generally it is considered that life is a "naturally" occurring phenomena, especially by atheists. However there is a bit more to this which most people don't consider. Life is not a natural phenomena. When I say it is not a natural phenomena I mean it is not something replicated by humans using natural processes. For example we know that if we combine hydrogen and oxygen we get water. This is an example of a natural processes. We are also able form other more complex molecules by using our understanding of chemistry and physics. These complex molecules and structures are created using the natural laws of physics and chemistry that we know of.
I disagree with your definition of life being non-replicating and/or chemically based (or are you saying it's not chemically based? I'm confused). Most forms of life we can observe obviously can and do self-replicate, and that includes humans, so humans do replicate life, through procreation. It's not like every time a baby is conceived, God can briefly be seen tinkering in a woman's vagina (or a petri dish, increasingly). If you believe God CAN be observed taking part in this action, do provide some evidence.
As for life being chemically based, I don't think that's true. I believe an AI can be alive and a good case can be made that a computer virus is alive. And they're not biological machines in the way we are, despite being alive. And that is a product of the environment in which they were created and live being cybernetic instead of chemical. We live in a world with tons of chemicals that have come together over billions of years, with living beings existing in billions of combinations. Every second, billions of new organisms begin to exist--animal, vegetable, fungus, bacteria, etc--each one of them trying a slightly different combination of genes than the last generation to see if that combination is adaptable to the environment they find themselves in. And a whole lot of them fail. But some succeed, and they go on to make more copies of themselves, and the process continues.
However the creation of life has proven to be extremely difficult. Numerous experiments show that forming the simplest known living organism is not possible using the current technology and understanding we have. Experiments show that certain structures are simply not stable or just don't behave the way we expect them to. Now if life was truly a naturally occurring phenomena then it should be straight forward to replicate it just as we can replicate complex molecules.
Now I know some will say that we may be able to create life in the future from scratch and that is a valid point. However the fact still stands today that humans are not able to create life from scratch. This also needs to be taken a step further to investigate why it's not possible to create life.
In addition to the aforementioned computer virus life and possibly other AI life, there is also this:
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/press/press-releases/full-text/article/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell-constructed-by-j-craig-venter-institute-researcher/home/Scientists HAVE created synthetic biological life. Your ignorance does not make your point more accurate. As for "why it's not possible to create life", even if that were true, it would be a philosophical debate and not a scientific one.
As it happens I know quite a bit about the human genome project and other projects involving those scientists and that material because it was done in my hometown, so it was always on the local news as I was growing up. In fact, the headquarters of the human genome project is right across the street from the hospital I was born in and has a parking lot that is right next to the parking lot of my uni (but theirs is closed off with a guarded gate and big fence because they constantly receive threats by creationists). Very pretty building.
Topic: Ringside: Quod Sum Eris vs CallMeTed - Is there scientific evidence that proves