[CarolinaGuitarman]

"I guess what I am saying is if someone in a science class asks such a question, shouldn't the teacher be able to at least say something like "many people's religion says they were created and science does not have an answer?"

Science does have an answer, if tentative, that at least has some evidence to back it up. The statement you want added is so general, while I wouldn't object necessarily to the religious allusion, I doubt it will do anything to answer the student's question that they already didn't know.

"I guess I do not understand why abiogenesis is not spontaneous generation?"

Spontaneous generation was a claim about how microorganisms and many insects come to be, instantaneously, and that this happens all the time even today. It has nothing to do with abiogenesis, which tries to show how the chemical precursors to life could have formed and come together to form the first self-replicating organism. Abiogenesis does not claim that the conditions for the formation of life exist anymore, nor does it deny that today life comes from life only (on earth anyway; it says nothing of what may be happening on other planets.) It has about as much to do with spontaneous generation as Lucretius' ideas about atoms have to do with modern atomic theory.

[microgood]

Spontaneous generation was a claim about how microorganisms and many insects come to be, instantaneously, and that this happens all the time even today. It has nothing to do with abiogenesis, which tries to show how the chemical precursors to life could have formed and come together to form the first self-replicating organism.

Thanks. I looked it up and Wikipedia calls spontaneous generation Aristotelean Abiogenesis and is about generation from decaying matter. The more modern version relates to generation from nonliving matter or matter that no longer exists (the second part sounds kind of like a dodge or is at least unprovable).

[furball4paws]

The Spontaneous Generation canard has raised its ugly head, again. In response, I give the following quote from The Microbial World, 4th edition, 1976 by Stanier, Adelberg and Ingraham. This used to be a top notch Microbiology text, but unfortunately the authors have gone to the great test tube in the sky or the Florida.

"It has been stated that the work of Pasteur and Tyndall "disproved" the possibility of spontaneous generation, and their experimental findings have been used to support the contention that spontaneous generation has never occurred. This is an unjustifiable extension of their actual findings. The conclusion that we may safely draw is a much more limited one: that at the present time microorganisms do not arise spontaneously in properly sterilized organic infusions. It is probable that the primary origin of life on earth did involve a kind of spontaneous generation, although a far more gradual and subtle one than that envisaged by the proponents of the doctrine during the 18th and 19th centuries" - p.9 (the words are of R.Y. Stanier)