Well, that's essentially what Hoyle and others (including many ardent creationists) argue when they suggest that proteins spontaneously formed all at once. They didn't—they can't have. As Richard Dawkins argues in The Blind Watchmaker, there must have been some kind of cumulative selection process that allowed amino acids to assemble in chunks. Perhaps two or three amino acids linked up for some simple purpose and then after a time bumped into some other similar small cluster and in so doing "discovered" some additional improvement.

Chemical reactions of the sort associated with life are actually something of a commonplace. It may be beyond us to cook them up in a lab, a la Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, but the universe does it readily enough. Lots of molecules in nature get together to form long chains called polymers. Sugars constantly assemble to form starches. Crystals can do a number of lifelike things—replicate, respond to environmental stimuli, take on a patterned complexity. They've never achieved life itself, of course, but they demonstrate repeatedly that complexity is a natural, spontaneous, entirely commonplace event. There may or may not be a great deal of life in the universe at large, but there is no shortage of ordered self-assembly, in everything from the transfixing symmetry of snowflakes to the comely rings of Saturn.