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There were almost certainly other factors at work that we don't know about and may never understand.

Fine. Show your evidence. Otherwise, this is just philosophical armwaving, not science.

So you are claiming that there are no factors involved in the origins of life that are not undersood?

I'll admit my statement was not scientifically very meaningful because it was absolutely not falsifiable (there's no way it could ever be proven false). On the other hand, I would have thought it pretty much self-evident: on almost every subject, there are factors which are not fully understood and never will be; why should the origin of life be any different?

For natural selection, as it is understood, to result in the creation of a new species, a fairly tricky chain of events has to take place. It is likely that such chains of events have occured occasionally, and that some species exist because of them. On the other hand, there's a big difference between saying a process might create a new species here and there, and saying that all species owe their existence solely to that process.