what we (don't) know about the origins of life

And here's today's reprise of an excellent piece at LewRockwell.com by Fred Reed-- from four years ago-- which I will excerpt here...

I was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.

The question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations that I encountered in textbooks of biology ran to, "In primeval seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in a rock, a skim formed a membrane, and life began its immense journey." I saw no reason to doubt this. If it hadn't been true, scientists would not have said that it was.

Remember, I was fifteen....I was probably in college when I found myself asking what seemed to me straightforward questions about the chemical origin of life. ...

(1) Life was said to have begun by chemical inadvertence in the early seas. Did we, I wondered, really know of what those early seas consisted? Know, not suspect, hope, theorize, divine, speculate, or really, really wish.

The answer was, and is, "no." We have no dried residue, no remaining pools, and the science of planetogenesis isn't nearly good enough to provide a quantitative analysis.

(2) Had the creation of a living cell been replicated in the laboratory? No, it hadn't, and hasn't.

(3) Did we know what conditions were necessary for a cell to come about? No, we didn't, and don't.

(4) Could it be shown to be mathematically probable that a cell would form, given any soup whatever? No, it couldn't, and can't. (At least not without cooking the assumptions.)

Well, I thought, sophomore chemistry major that I then was: If we don't know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary, and can't reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can't show it to be statistically probable – why are we so very sure that it happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence?

My point was not that evolutionists were necessarily wrong. I simply didn't see the evidence. While they couldn't demonstrate that life had begun by chemical accident, I couldn't show that it hadn't....I just didn't know how life came about. I still don't. Neither do evolutionists....

To evolutionists I say, "I am perfectly willing to believe what you can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube, and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life. I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed. But don't expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and secular theology."