The tenacity with which materialism (abiogenesis and evolution) is held is in large part because its thought to be the only alternative to untenable religions. It also seems intellectual since it's taught in schools and prestigious scientists and thinkers believe it. Philosophically, it's attractive because it justifies amoral freedom and unaccountability. Facts, logic, and evidence barely have a chance against such powerful reasons to accept and retain this belief.

Hobnobbing With Science
 
Lacking evidence to the contrary, the materialistic explanation of origins appears to have been accepted into the fraternity of science without passing the initiation rigors of observation and experimentation. That would make it a pretender that has slipped in through the back door. Then, by raising the banner of science and hobnobbing with people who do real science it has become an assumed scientific truth.
 
Science is a method of exploring the world, it's not a dogma that demands compliance. Science requires observation and repeatability first, conclusions second. But neither spontaneous generation nor cell-to-man evolution has been observed nor repeated in a laboratory. Moreover, unlike true science, these beliefs have done nothing in a material or philosophical way to better the world.

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But it's persuasive when the same people who do real science sing the praises of materialism. After all, if a person is smart enough to split and splice genes and atoms, or explain astrophysics, then they must be right when they talk about origins. And talk they do. It's hard to find any biological or cosmological literature that isn't seeded with references to evolution. This is done even though evolution has nothing to do with discovery or salutary value.
 
Those on the outside looking into the esoteric world of scientists and brainwashed in schools presenting evolution as fact assume there is a scientific consensus. That in itself persuades laypeople. But there is no consensus. For example, at dissentfromdarwin.org, hundreds of scientists and professors sign a statement that they are skeptical of the basic tenets of evolution. But even if there were consensus on either side of the issue, popularity proves nothing.
 
Evolution has become the intellectual word du jour without ever being critically examined on its own merits. The word could be replaced with "design," or "creation" in any text of value and no beneficial information nor understanding of reality would be lost.
 
Even many religionists have been cowed.  Seeking to appear progressive and enlightened, they hybridize their religious faith with the evolutionary faith. But this doesn't deem them with the credibility they seek. First, it makes no sense that the Creator would do a special case continuous violation of its own natural laws to accommodate evolution. Second, it makes no sense that the Creator would comport with an atheistic materialistic view that denies the Creator's existence.

Alchemy, Shape Shifting, and Fairy Tales
 
Alchemists of old hoped to be able to brew gold and create elixirs for eternal youth. The idea of magical transformations has seeded mythology for thousands of years. Read Grimm's Fairy Tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or the Italian epics. People change into gods, gods change into people, animals become human, and humans become animals.

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​Evolution is the same kind of mythology. Although the story is drawn out into smaller and seemingly more plausible steps, the end result is life popping into existence from stardust, and creatures magically transforming into new, more functionally complicated creatures. Since such transformations violate nature's evidence and natural laws, evolution, if it actually did occur, would be beyond nature. In other words, supernatural.

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​Panspermia Solves Nothing
 
Some evolutionary scientists recognize the paucity of evidence and, in desperation, invoke panspermia—the seeding of life on Earth from outer space. Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, invented "directed panspermia" which invokes aliens bringing life here on spacecraft so it's protected from the interstellar elements.
 
But that doesn't really solve the problem of the origin of life, it merely displaces it to the aliens' planet where the same problems of origin remain.

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Keeping a Distance from Religion
 
Perhaps the most common underlying reason evolution is believed is that the only alternative there is thought to be is religion. Religions commonly anthropomorphize a Creator thus making it intellectually and ethically difficult to reconcile the evil, suffering, and injustice in the world with a god who can intervene like we think we would. (I will address this issue more thoroughly later in the book.)
 
Also, a return to the darkness of religious authority is terrifying. If it were not for the intervention of the secular state, religion would still be mandating the torturing and killing of those who don't believe in a domed heaven, circling sun, flat Earth, fire breathing dragons, talking snakes and donkeys, magnetic islands that pulled ships to them, Cyclops, witches, demon-possessed cats, and curing disease with holy water enemas.
 
The Bible-based belief that the sun revolved around the Earth held sway for 1500 years. When Copernicus published his contrary theory of heliocentricity in 1530, it was prefaced with a disclaimer so its author would not meet the flames of the Holy Inquisition. An infallible pope placed the book on the don't read list in Index Librorum Prohibitorum where it remained until another infallible pope removed it in 1835.
 
Giordano Bruno openly advocated the double motion of Earth (the Earth revolves on its axis and around the sun). For this anti-Biblical heresy, he was incinerated in 1600. Galileo (1564- 1642) provided further proof of Earth's double motion, but his observations were considered heretical because he used a telescope rather than the Bible and syllogisms. Under threat of torture by the Inquisitors, he recanted: "I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your Eminence, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the Earth."
 
Shedding the authority of religion allowed the Earth to move correctly and brought us into the light of reason and evidence. For those aware of this history, turning back is unthinkable.
 
However, the fact that scientists discovered that disease could be caused by germs, and not from skimping on tithes, is no reason to believe any pronouncement scientists may make.
 
Unfortunately, in the haste to flee from religious belief and faith, people have uncritically adopted faith and belief in materialistic origins

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​The idea of evolution has percolated through society taking on a grandeur that does not fit its intellectually homely underpinnings.  It's a story repeated so often in the most prestigious circles, that the story itself has become the evidence.
 
When people want to believe something, they'll torture the facts however necessary into the service of the belief. This isn't mere innocent folly. Flying away on the wings of belief betrays the duty to truth and threatens the self and the entire planet.

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There is an alternative to materialism, abiogenesis, evolution, and religion. Recognizing it requires admitting ignorance and intellect beyond our own. That does not mean a return to the Dark Ages, sacrificing lambs, blowing ourselves up in a jihad, or kissing the boots of church leaders. Science doesn't end if nature is found to have the footprint of a creative consciousness that has nothing whatsoever to do with the anthropomorphized gods of man-made religions.