Game of Life

This should help to give an idea on how complex structures (like cells) can arise from simple ones (like atoms).
After all, life itself is nothing else than a high level of organization of very simple things. So we should not "see" life in the constituent parts, but rather in the way they relate to each other, and what level of complexity they can achieve.

Now, one might think that really complex rules would give rise to complex systems... well, not really. Apparently, it can take very simple rules to generate astonishingly complex systems. If we think about it, actually, if we want to account for the existence of life, we have to rely on basically the four allowed interactions, so... this is a process called self-organization. For more detailed references on this topic, please follow this link.

I'll point out to one more thing, and that is the Game of Life. It was proposed by John Conway, and it appeared on a 1970 Scientific American issue, on Martin Gardner article. It is sometimes called only "Life".
"Life" is an example of cellular automata. Basically it is a big chessboard with some squares painted and others not. There are very simple rules to advance, and they imply watching the whole board. There are no winners, and no losers, but it's certainly worth a try.