Life comes from life

[Minimalist]

The "mud-man" and "rib-woman" crowd has trouble with that, Alex.

[Won2blv]

Those are all really good responses. Thanks everyone

[Time Traveler]

Viruses, long held to not conform to the definition of life, are now being thought of by some differently. (I would link to an interesting article from popular science, but I haven't hit my 30/30 yet.) The point is, our understanding of "life" is itself evolving. It's conceivable that someday we will have answers as to how life originated naturally. But until we discover that mechanism, you can safely bet that many theists will continue to insert God into that gap of the unknown.

[KUSA]

This is how life on Earth began.
http://youtu.be/OB8cop0TLR0

[ignoramus]

The alternative is even more preposterous!

Logic dictates that something came from something.
Even God needed to have a beginning....

Unless of course you believe that God poofed himself into existence?
In which case, you've been watching too much Disney channel!.

[RozKek]

Viruses, long held to not conform to the definition of life, are now being thought of by some differently. (I would link to an interesting article from popular science, but I haven't hit my 30/30 yet.) The point is, our understanding of "life" is itself evolving. It's conceivable that someday we will have answers as to how life originated naturally. But until we discover that mechanism, you can safely bet that many theists will continue to insert God into that gap of the unknown.

There's an exception: You're allowed to link aslong as it's relevant to the discussion.

[Fireball]

However the mechanism in detail, it is clear that life from nonlife will not happen frequently. But remember that the MU experiment -which was designed, but designed to mimic natural processes on young planets-  ran for a small fraction of a human lifespan in one small box. The visible Universe ran it for hundreds of millions of years on 10000000000000000000000 entire planets.

Yup. The universe as the biggest array processor, ever. I think where people get hung up is thinking of it in a linear fashion. "Here these pieces assembled in just this way, and went on from there to make life".  But in reality it is as you stated- many planets and a long time. Figure just how big the Earth's oceans alone are, and all that sloshing at some point has to bring something together, and that's just Earth. Multiply that by the number of available planets. I personally would be astonished if we were alone in the universe, for life. Probably will never know, though.