[Liberty1970]

That's an overly simplistic and somewhat wrong comment. But the point is that the idea that life could arise by chance, a notion that was vaguely credible when we were ignorant of the complexity of life, is no longer even remotely credible.

The attempted course of the last 40 years has been to suppose that since life cannot arise by chance (as was known in scientific circles by the 1960's), the laws of nature must just happen to be structured such that life is actually 'designed' to appear. In other words, instead of assuming a car could form by chance, assume the existence of an automated, robotic car factory. If you just assume that, the spontaneous generation of a car without a designer is easy. This was first promoted by Kenyon and Steinman in Biochemical Predestination, and remains the fundamental approach to abiogenesis today.

So, now they just need to justify their assumption of the spontaneous generation of natural conditions that are essentially a 'factory' that will output a living form. Good luck with that... it's just making the whole problem worse. A.E. Wilder-Smith debunked this whole approach soon after the aforementioned book, and Dr. Kenyon subsequently became a biblical creationist.

[Behemoth the Cat]

Liberty, no, this was not a simplistic comment. I am merely re-stating the simplistic view often expressed on FR by one, small branch of the 'creation' camp. For some reason, this group, the so-called Young Earth creationists, is quite vocal here.

There are other creationist beliefs, from ones completely in agreement with the current state of knowledge and scientific methodology (e.g. Theistic Evolution), to views which seek God in the gaps in our knowledge (Intelligent Design). But for some reason we have a group of Young Earthers here, and their beliefs are: all species were created 6,000 years ago, in 6 days, and there is no such thing as evolution. Moreover, everything in science that opposes this view is dismissed or disputed (using simplistic argumentation), whenever it is convenient, and this not only affects biology. For example, the rate of radioactive decay 'can change' (this is in order to undermine radioisotope dating), stratigraphy is a scam (to undermine the material evidence of fossils), orogenesis/plate tectonics does not exist (to make the flood as the source of fossils on higher elevations) computer science is invoked selectively to illustrate the complexity involved (but machine learning and probabilistic algorithms are carefully sidestepped). Simply, quackery on the part of the 'creation scientists', and gross ignorance on the part of their audience...

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

Dr. Kenyon subsequently became a biblical creationist.

I thought he was an ID proponent rather than a biblical creationist.

[Moonman62]

But the point is that the idea that life could arise by chance, a notion that was vaguely credible when we were ignorant of the complexity of life, is no longer even remotely credible.

What do you mean by life arising by chance?