No, the argument is much deeper than that. I am not just speaking of a laboratory setting, I am speaking of almost any setting at all. It is the question of millions of monkeys trying to write a new Shakesperian play. Give them trillions of years, they still will not write anything like that.
But if a self-replicating cell of a simpler type can exist (perhaps a lipid membrane enclosing a few protein or RNA fragments, 1/1000 the complexity of the simplest currently feasible cell, and the “laboratory,” instead of ~1 cubic meter is instead the world’s oceans (1,370,000,000 cubic kilometers, or 1,370,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters), and the “experiment,” instead of taking, say, 10 years, takes 4,000,000,000 years, then the process becomes 5.48E+29 (548,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times more likely to produce life.
Well, you have several problems with the statement above. The biggest is that you cannot have a living organism which is that simple. Let's look at some of the absolute essentials:
1. you need a system for replication, this is not so easy as it sounds. Viri have to 'borrow' the replicating system of true living things.
2. you need an excretory system - to dispose of waste.
3. you need a nutrition system - and this is where it really gets to be impossible. For nourishing a living thing you need either to produce your own nourishment as plants do or eat other living things as animals do. Problem with the first life is that you do not have any other creatures to eat so you have to make your own. This requires photosynthesis or chemosynthesis. Either one is a very complex process requiring many genes some of which are quite complex.
In fact the number of DNA base pairs I gave is more favorable than most scientists would postulate. The smallest living things have some 1,000,000 DNA base pairs and some 600 genes. Very few scientists would believe that anything even a quarter that size would have the capability of replicating and providing its own nourishment system. So as far as science goes, your proposition is impossible.
The first sentence is true today. But the first life forms had no competition, and were floating in a soup of amino acids and other nutrients, making the second (bold) sentence false.