Formation of life.

[Jackalope]

Atheist what are your beliefs about life coming into existance?

I believe that life has, in fact, come into existence.

This. Beyond that, all I can say is "I don't know, but there's some interesting hypotheses."

[Mister Agenda]

We don't know how life began. We may never know, although it's likely we'll one day be able to show at least one way that it COULD have happened, that is, achieve abiogenesis in a lab under (the hellish) conditions simulating what's believed to be the case when life originated.

We DO know that the earliest life forms were micro-organisms. We've found fossil evidence for them older than any other fossils.

[ShaMan]

Is it possible that we're all a thought in some higher mind, yet un-created?

[C4RM5]

Now we're going into some sort of paradox.

[FatAndFaithless]

Carm, short answer = we dunno. Neither do you.

[Anomalocaris]

I believe that life has, in fact, come into existence.

This. Beyond that, all I can say is "I don't know, but there's some interesting hypotheses."

Beyond that we actually know quite a lot. We know life consist of specific sets of proteins out of many more possibilities. We know a key attribute of life - self replication - occurs spontaneously with some of these proteins in nature using a process which is similar to how it is done in life. We know at cellular levels, all life share same basic functions which are overly elaborate and wasteful for what they do for many of these life, implying they inherited these functions, and that these functions weren't created for their benefits. We know there are tantalizing confluences between aspects of the environment in which we think the conditions are present for life, and secondary features of life, implying certain universal, but not functionally mandatory features of life, can be explained by the hypothesis that life spontaneously arose in specific environments.