It's hard to make structures in CGoL that are robust to collisions. So if you randomly initialised the universe I suspect you would never get life, because any complex structure that did arise would crash into random junk and be destroyed as soon as it tried to move.
If all nodes had a 1:1,000,000,000 chance to randomly flip every tick, then resilient structures would probably arise eventually, given a very large (or infinite) board.