That's a fair statement, js1138; nonetheless I imagine the physical laws are not violated.
BB: That's a fair statement, js1138; nonetheless I imagine the physical laws are not violated.
JS: And electrons behave differently in a tunnel diode than they do in a wire of pure copper. Again, no physical laws are violated. (What does that mean, anyway? If physical laws appear to be violated, the laws are incorrectly formulated, by definition.)
Matter is neither alive nor dead. A physical object or structure can be alive or dead, just as a physical object can be a pile of rubble or a cell phone. It is not the physicalness that is important, but the structure.
Structures and assemblies can have properties that the constituent components do not have. Salt has properties that cannot be derived from the properties of chlorine and sodium.
For this reason, you cannot prove, from first principles or from statistics, that abiogenesis is impossible. You might be able to prove that a given hypothesis is faulty, but you can't derive all possible routes from the properties of known elements.
Science is a creative, and I daresay, iterative and evolutionary process. It proceeds through cycles of guesswork and testing. ID is one of those guesses. Unfortunately, it is the wrong kind of guess. Rather than guessing that something is possible and attempting to demonstrate the possibility, it guesses that something is impossible and engages in mathematical argumentation. You can't prove that something is impossible. You can only make repeated attempts and succeed or fail. In particular, you cannot prove from first principles, what the properties of a new complex organic compound will be. You cannot prove from first principles that chemical evolution cannot produce a replicator.