This topic has been beaten to death in many many forums. A quick net search on abiogenesis would yield a very large amount of hits. There is even a web site with a FAQ on it at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/ This web site grew out of the old usenet newsgroup talk.origins. Caveat: That website is dedicated to the confrontatin between scientists and creationists, so you will see a certain stance quite heavily evidenced.

In any meaningful interpretation of the term, life is a "purely material process." We don't see life without matter. When we manipulate the matter life is made of, the life responds as material stuff. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Merchant of Venice, (Act III, scene I)

Life can turn non-living stuff into living stuff. Plants, for example, can produce more plants from quite simple chemicals. This shows that converting non-living to living stuff does not violate any laws of physics.

There is an entire generation of experiments that show many of the steps required occur spontaneously in conditions we believe would exist on the Earth before life arose. The archetypal example is the Miller-Urey experiment. There are many variations with a large variety of conditions and parameters. The trend is very strong. Non-living stuff such as water, oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, methane, etc., when exposed to energy such as ultraviolet, electrical discharge, etc., will produce molecules normally associated with living things. This includes such chemicals as amino acids which can spontaneously assemble into proteins.

This topic has been beaten to death in many many forums. A quick net search on abiogenesis would yield a very large amount of hits. There is even a web site with a FAQ on it at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/ This web site grew out of the old usenet newsgroup talk.origins. Caveat: That website is dedicated to the confrontation between scientists and creationists, so you will see a certain stance quite heavily evidenced.

In any meaningful interpretation of the term, life is a "purely material process." We don't see life without matter. When we manipulate the matter life is made of, the life responds as material stuff. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Merchant of Venice, (Act III, scene I)

Life can turn non-living stuff into living stuff. Plants, for example, can produce more plants from quite simple chemicals. This shows that converting non-living to living stuff does not violate any laws of physics.

There is an entire generation of experiments that show many of the steps required occur spontaneously in conditions we believe would exist on the Earth before life arose. The archetypal example is the Miller-Urey experiment. There are many variations with a large variety of conditions and parameters. The trend is very strong. Non-living stuff such as water, oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, methane, etc., when exposed to energy such as ultraviolet, electrical discharge, etc., will produce molecules normally associated with living things. This includes such chemicals as amino acids which can spontaneously assemble into proteins.