So, mostly because I can't figure out yet how to encode these ideas mathematically, I’m going to try and illustrate the logic of biochemistry with a story about some of the games chemicals play and about frustration. The details are grossly oversimplified and the physics is romanticized but those are essential components for any good myth, the emergence of life included...
First off, molecules aren’t alive, and like everything that isn’t alive they naturally evolve towards equilibrium with their surroundings, which is their, static, deterministic way of minimizing their energy/maximizing their entropy. For an individual molecule stuck inside a membrane with a bunch of other molecules, this can be difficult, and existence is a constant search for more stable ways to fold up and get into the lowest energy state possible. Except some proteins aren’t very stable by themselves in water and so they wrap onto some RNA as a way of reducing their free energy. But there's these free floating nucleotides that have this weird chemical handle with three phosphate ions attached to it, which we call ATP, and one of them comes along and it puts a phosphate ion on this protein attached to the RNA. The phosphate ion has a very high chemical potential in water, and pretty much every molecule that gets a phosphate stuck onto it just can’t wait to get it off, the ATP included. But the energy in this phosphate ion commits the protein-RNA structure to a cycle of steps, the end result of which is the creation of a strand of RNA complementary to whatever RNA that protein is attached to, and which the molecules perform exclusively as a way of trying to get back to their most stable conformation. Except that there’s more ATP coming!