How did the chemicals for life come together??..

[Statler Waldorf]

I understand natural selection pretty well, but do we know how the necessary chemicals came together, when the Earth was young, to form life? I'd like to know, and creationists sometimes argue that conditions on the Earth, when it was "new" were far too chaotic for life to have formed "by accident", as they say.

Actually in all honesty most secular scientists are shying away from abiogenesis because they have realized that it is a statistical impossibility. Even Richard Dawkins has begun to lean towards the necessary pre-assembled first life being "planted" here by other civilizations on other planets. Of course this just moves the problem to those planets and does not solve it. At least they realize it could not happen on Earth for numerous reasons. Life cannot form spontaneously with or without the presence of oxygen, so that pretty much solves it.

As for the Miller-Urey reaserch that was mentioned earlier...most people who still believe in Abiogenesis are more just rooting for what they want to see in this kind of research and not actually paying attention to the findings. All life with only a couple very small exceptions (a couple structures in bacteria) are built with left-handed amino acids. The problem is, we have no experiment that can synthesize and assemble only left handed amino acids. The miller-urey research synthesized a 50/50 mixure of left and right handed amino acids. So this just will not do. These experiments are always done is extremely controlled environments, ones which are not anything like what the Earth's early environment would have been like. They always have a very convenient way of removing the energy that assembles the amino acids before it also destroys them. It's not particularly good science. This does not even take into account the young faint sun paradox. If the life on Earth really formed 3-3.5 billion years ago the sun would only be intense enough to put the Earth's average temperature around 20 degrees F. Of course this is below freezing and would ensure that no life was being "formed". I already have a Faith, I don't need to adopt the Faith of those who still believe in Abiogenesis.

"...we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations."

- Franklin M. Harold in the way of the cell: molecules, organisms and the order of life (2001).

"The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers … [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance."

- Hubert Yockey in Information Theory and Molecular Biology