Spontaneous generation is an old belief that life automatically arises from nonliving matter. It was a reasonable thing to assume in the pre-scientific era since there were no microscopes to identify what caused critters to pop out of manure and mud.
 
Spontaneous Generation is Disproven
 
Now, in every introductory biology textbook, the disproof of spontaneous generation is featured as part of the proud history of the march of science. Experiments by Redi, Spallanzani, and Pasteur demonstrated that if the starting materials in a flask were sealed and rendered lifeless by cooking, no life appeared. Life arose only if there was preexisting life in the flask.
 
This resulted in the Law of Biogenesis: life can only come from preexisting life.

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But the ambitious goal of proving spontaneous generation took on new life with Darwin's evolutionary ideas. It's now disguised by renaming it "evolution," "abiogenesis," or "biopoiesis," giving it a more modern and credible scientific flare.
 
Pellegrino, in his book, Ghosts of Vesuvius, confidently describes the saga of abiogenesis as follows:
 
"In the beginning, there was little besides the strong and the weak forces, gravitation, and electromagnetism . . . hydrogen and helium, with a little lithium here and there; but from the lights in the heavens, you might have guessed that these were enough . . . Life was inevitable . . . warm, wet zones . . . were trying to make life . . . From atoms and empty space . . . From the dust of stars . . . the phenomenon we call life is but the most likely outcome of some very common elements, if stirred together and kept warm enough and wet enough for long enough . . . We are the dust of the universe trying to understand itself . . . volcanically heated water . . . to act as primitive catalytic centers . . . nudging atoms of carbon forcefully and with statistical inevitability in the direction of biochemistry . . . life . . . would appear to have been pulled from a curiously simple bag of tricks . . . Life from nonlife. You could probably start the process in your own kitchen."
 
Really? We're to believe we could do in our kitchen what thousands of scientists for hundreds of years have been unable to do? Not one experiment using the best brains on the planet has demonstrated life can come from nonlife. To this day, no living thing has ever emerged from a lab where the starting materials were simple atoms.

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Even if life were the mere assemblage of atoms and molecules, which it isn't since dead things have those composites, the sheer scope of the problem is beyond human capability. A "simple" bacterium contains 50 billion atoms in precise ratios and specific functionally complex arrangements all interrelated in precise machine-like ways.
 
Invented Words Do Not Prove Evolution
 
That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of proposed scenarios about life's early moorings. But these guesses are propped up by creating new words, not life. Speculative precursors are given evocative bio-seductive names like proteinoids, protocells, bions, protobionts, eobionts, microspheres, and biomorphs. These words, the words alone, are then promoted as transitional steps on the living cell's ascent from inorganic soup. There's talk of "membranes," "organelles," "reproduction," and "vesicles," words normally associated with real living things. But that's only proof by linguistic hobnobbing. The definition of life is even broadened to help accommodate such potential ancestors and to make it near impossible to differentiate life from nonlife.

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The stories about life from non-life, as technically sophisticated as they may be at times, are still just stories of make-believe—"once upon a time, long, long ago . . ." The words, the invented tendentious words themselves (abiogenesis, biopoiesis, protobionts, biomorphs, etc.), not real facts and proof are the crux of the origin of life case.

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Scientists today—3.8 billion years after life supposedly bubbled up out of the primordial broth—with all of the 21st-century technology at their disposal, have yet to even synthesize one cell or even one functional part (organelle) of a cell, or even any but the very simplest of the 6000 known enzymes essential to life. It can't be done with all our brainpower, but stewing little eddies at the base of volcanoes 3.8 billion years ago supposedly did it all on their own.
 
That conclusion is only possible if any conceivable alternative explanation for the origin of life is dismissed a priori.
 
Dead Things Are Not Alive
 
For hundreds of years, explorers have tried to find the right mixture of chemicals to create life. We know that amino acids, proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, minerals, vitamins and so on are necessary for life. If an abiogenesis chemist creates any one of these components in a laboratory, there is great excitement. The accomplishment is heralded as proof that life is no big mystery. All that is needed is a little more time, more research, more funding . . . and manufacturers will be creating life with as much ease as they now produce plastic spoons and noodles.
 
But there's something amiss in this enthusiasm. During my medical life, I have seen many deaths. One second a person or animal is alive, the next moment they're dead. For medical practitioners, it's incredibly frustrating to see this happen when the material composition of the organism is still all there. Reversing death, even when all the necessary biochemical components are there, preformed in the dead body, has proven to be impossible.
 
If an entire organism with all of its trillions of chemical parts and pieces in place, once dead, remains dead, there is no reason to believe that a chemist's ability to create a few of these parts in a laboratory proves that life can come from nonlife. Faith, not evidence or reason, is the only basis for such belief.
 
Moreover, the technology is now available to analyze an organism and quantitate the precise percentages of its different atoms. If life and health could result from the mere assemblage of atoms, alchemists would have long ago created life, and doctors would have long ago solved the problems of disease and death. Instead, only lifeless pretenses emerge in the modern-day alchemist's laboratory, and death and disease increase in proportion to the degree that doctors treat life as if it were merely an assemblage of chemicals. Life is clearly more than a mixture of its chemical components and cannot be explained by them.
 
No Cheating
 
Even if someday scientists create life in the laboratory starting with atoms, spontaneous generation would not be proven. Millions of working hours in laboratories by Nobel laureates over hundreds of years would hardly qualify as convincing evidence that no intelligence is necessary to create life.

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Life's Components Are Fragile
 
Another stickler is that the materials and forces that are supposed to have caused the formation of the biochemicals of life—water, heat, lightning bolts, and so on—are actually most effective at disassembling, not creating them. For example, enzymes are chains of amino acids configured in elaborate three-dimensional forms and are essential to virtually every life process. They would have had to form for life to emerge out of the bubbling volcanic goo. But they are destroyed at temperatures above only 118°F (not to mention the killer impact of ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, acidity, concurrent noxious chemicals, oxidizing and chelating minerals, hydration, acidity, alkalinity—all present in a volcanic setting). One lightning bolt blazing in at 55,000°F would nix any abiogenesis hopes in short order.
 
The Law of Biogenesis stands. It affirms the laws of thermodynamics, information, and probability and points to intelligent causation. Either scientific laws are wrong, or abiogenesis is wrong.

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​These conclusions require no religious predisposition. We're simply letting known truths guide us.
 
Anyone who disagrees is free to prove by evidence or experiment that complex things on the scale of complexity found even in the simplest living organism can arise spontaneously.