I am familiar enough with the issue to know that you won't find a reputable technical dictionary that defines data as "things."
But of course we can clear up the matter by overlooking the misuse of this word and get to the heart of what you are attempting to say. Given what we know, it is difficult to attribute the existence of life to anything other than purposeful design because it's just too complex to come about without design. At this point we are very close to being on the same page...except that I would stress that the argument for design is dependent on the notion that what we know is all there is to know.
The hard reality is that there is no way to plot out the probability of anything happening without knowing the conditions, the factors that could enhance or prohibit something from happening. We don't know--and never will know--if there were any special conditions in the universe that would make a transition from non-organic to orgaic matter more probable at the time life came about in the universe. We've only been able to analyze a small percent of what the universe is made up of. "Given what we know," just isn't enough to make any probability statement.
You're still missing the point of the math in this article. We can predict the likelihood of data sequencing itself without intelligent intervention.
We can calculate the odds of data being already sequenced on a hard drive when it is formed. We can know the mathematical probability of characters that are formed by pebbles falling on keyboards - making an English word. Likewise, we can derive the probability / improbability of bases sequencing themselves without intelligent intervention into DNA strands capable of creating life.
And the odds for such occurances aren't good. The author shows that for our alphabet, non-intelligent key-presses are unlikely to ever form sentences of more than 96 characters, with "ever" being defined as 17 Billion years for 17 Billion Earth-like planets.
That is a mathematical way of saying that large, long, complex sequences do not form naturally.
But that doesn't rule out Evolution, natural abiogenesis, the big bang, or even primordial soup theories.
If we could show that Life can be formed from DNA strands that are comprised of fewer than 96 bases in their entire sequence, then there actually would be math that supports the natural creation of life without intelligent intervention.
Then again, showing that sort of Life might very well be akin to showing that Windows XP could be written with 96 lines of code, even though we know that it takes Millions of lines of code to program XP.
Likewise, even the simplist life forms, such as the amoebae, contain Millions of sequential bases in each DNA strand.