Life
life is generic name of type physical objects that have all the following properties:
L1. The type of object has modifications, that allow the reproduction and mutations.
L2. The object uses the deviation of the surrounding medium from the thermal equilibrium for the self-mantaining.
L3. The object reacts to the surrounding conditions in such a way that its behavior can be efficiently described using terms "need", "good", "bad" and/or "will".
Objects, characterized with properties L1,L2,L3 are qualified as life. The science that deals with life is called biology.
All the known examples of life are built–up on the base of organic molecules and water; even more all the known examples of life seem to use the same system of encoding of organic components in the segments of the DNA molecule.
There is difficult question about viruses that do not show any metabolism between the acts of self-reproduction; their reproduction implies the use of living creatures, pretty different from viruses.
During the documented human history, there was no description of experiments of creation of life from the non-living substances. Based on such an observation, there is hypothesis, that the life was created by God and cannot be created in the laboratory.
The hypothesis about the extraordinary act of Creation can be formulated in the following way:
God had created the life. The probability of spontaneous creation of life from non–living objects is negligible. No artificial life can be created in the laboratory, even if the conditions of the early Earth will be reproduced and optimized for the creation of life.
In contrast to the public opinion, such a hypothesis is refutable; for its refutation it is sufficient to elaborate the methodic of creation of life from non–living substances. The refutability of this hypothesis makes it scientific concept, because other axioms (limited range of application, verifiability, simplicity and principle of correspondence) are satisfied.
The hypothesis allowed to predict the negative results of the mumerous experiments of creation of life from non–living objects. Many of such experiments were performed in the USSR by the soviet veterans who tried to demonstrate the natural origin of life. The soviet veterans (Oparin, Lysenki et al.) used the physical elimination of opponents instead of academic discussions. Later, the results by Oparin and Lysenko were revealed to be fake; such a result can be considered as confirmation of the hypothesis on the "Gog's origin of life".
One may expect, even if the artificial life will be created in the laboratory, the concept of the impossibility of creation of life from non-living objects will remain scientific concept, however with limited range of applicability. In the similar way, the concept The number of atoms of each kind in any closed system remains constant is scientific concept even after the discovery the nuclear reactions.
References
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Life