Randomness is required to model this problem
The issue is: "First cause". If God created the universe then who created God? However if you postulate that the process arose spontaneously from chaos then you avoid the pardox of "first cause". The next step is to model a system that becomes self organizing while driven purely by random numbers. Conway’s Game of Life provides a potential mechanism. The major unknowns are the basic rules governing "atom" replication and death along with the problem of appropriate dimensionality (I suspect a 3x3x3x3 cell in a 4-D matrix is necessary for describing an "atom"). If I had the time to code this thing up and work out the fine details then I could do better than arm wave (wish I had the time).
Gary