But as I’ve stated above, postulates about the origin of life don’t emanate from “atheists”, but from scientists. Specifically, researchers in organic chemistry. Who have sound reasons for the postulates they present, one large reason being that life is chemistry writ large. Millions of chemical reactions are taking place in your body right now, and if some of those reactions stop, you die.
Indeed, scientists have been able to trace metabolic pathways in action in real time, through a variety of experimental techniques, such as the use of isotopic labelling, or the use of green fluorescent protein in combination with confocal laser microscopy.
With respect to the matter of the chemical origin of life, as I stated above, there are over 100,000 peer reviewed scientific papers extant within the organic chemistry literature, documenting thousands of experiments demonstrating that the chemical reactions postulated to be implicated in the origin of life all work. Everything from synthesis of amino acids and nucleotides, through catalysed formation of RNA strands (including RNA strands that have catalytic activity in other chemical reactions), through lipid formation and self-assembly of lipid microstructures, and more recent experiments conducted upon synthetic protocells.
Indeed, several scientists working in the field alighted, by accident, upon chemical reactions that were not previously suspected to exist, but which provide neat solutions to issues previously considered problematic. John D. Sutherland’s work on nucleotide synthesis being a classic example of this.
Even more interestingly, there’s a paper in my collection demonstrating that once RNA strands exist, they can be subject to Darwinian evolution by nothing more complicated than the presence of chemical gradients. Another paper demonstrates that Darwinian behaviour can be exhibited by a pool of raw nucleotides under prebiotically plausible conditions of chemical selection.
At bottom, if you have a sufficiently large supply of well-defined simple molecules, and an external energy source such as a nearby star, chemical reactions will take place producing key components of cells in fairly short order. Integrating those components takes somewhat longer, but plausible pathways for so doing have been demonstrated in the laboratory.
Once you start delving into the relevant literature, it’s amazing what scientists have alighted upon in the mere 70 years that prebiotic chemistry research has been active.
Now that relevant initial steps have been determined, the next phase of research consists of determining how to integrate those steps, a matter that is very much uppermost in the minds of researchers such as Jack Szostak and Gerald F. Joyce.
Meanwhile, on a tangentially related matter, while NASA is busy devising missions to search for the possibility of life in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus, one exciting possibility, for me anyway, is the existence of a fully functioning RNA world in one or both of those environments, which would actually be more exciting for me than the discovery of actual living organisms. An early RNA world in one of those subsurface oceans, with ‘naked’ RNA strands, and a late RNA world in the other, featuring lipid encapsulation of RNA strands, would pretty much seal the deal with respect to the viability of prebiotic chemistry on Earth.
There’s even a possibility for something resembling prebiotic chemistry to occur on Titan. Yes, it’s extremely cold, and thus far, it’s chemistry hasn’t yielded any tell tale signals, but we’re in the infancy of exploration thereof, and a future mission loaded with the requisite instruments to examine that chemistry could turn up some interesting surprises.
We acquired more than sufficient evidence to conclude that pursuing prebiotic chemistry research is likely to yield interesting fruit decades ago. Since then, prebiotic chemistry researchers have answered questions that duplicitous mythology fanboys didn’t even know existed, while trying to dismiss the requisite research in their mendacious apologetic fabrications.