Perhaps someone can answer me these two questions. I am not trying to be sarcastic, but have never had these questions adequately answered and would like to know what a atheist evolutionist would think.
First, how could life begin from nothing? Please, I understand that some believe in a “primordial soup”...but that is misleading because initially there was no soup. Soup is organic, there would have only been inorganic materials from which to build life...how could that have possibly happened?
Second, if life were created from nothing...then why is not new life being created all the time now that there really is a very rich soup of life from which to draw on?
Since you asked me, I will tell you what I believe about the subject. I believe that God created the entire universe and everything in it, and that the reason why we don’t see any new creations is because God ceased creating life at the end of Day 6 of Creation Week.
Having said that, your points are well taken. We have never witnessed life self-assemble from the elements, nor have we for that matter ever witnessed macroevolution from already living organisms. As such, abiogenesis and macroevolution is faith, not science.
Those denying creation cannot even answer the most basic question of how matter was created from nothing. There's a far greater chance of creating man from a stick of butter than their is creating man from nothing.
I'll go with intelligent design on this one.
Second, if life were created from nothing...then why is not new life being created all the time now that there really is a very rich soup of life from which to draw on?
Good question. Why aren't there becoming more species instead of less if that soup is so good?
In the absence of oxygen, there would have been lots of different ways complex organic compounds could have been created - hot magma, ultraviolet light, lightning, asteroid impacts - and since there was nothing to "eat" those compounds, they accumulated to a sufficient (but still very low) concentration so that the ones with the chemical propensity to replicate could and did. Certain kinds of these, such as nucleic acids,and phospholipids replicated faster and were more successful at it than other forms. This process built on itself until the faster replicators crowded out other compounds that didn't replicate or replicated slowly or more imperfectly.
Eventually, groups of these successfully replicating compounds formed, by chance of course, although some including me, say it was inevitable given the amount of time involved. These groups were even more successful at replicating than the individual compounds. Continue this and pretty soon, after a billion years or so, you have life as we recognize it.
As for your second question, new life can't form now because the existing life is so efficient at using any source of energy, such as complex organic chemicals, that there isn't a sufficient concentration of these organics.
The biggest problem I have with the ID people is that they think too small, concentrating on feathers and eyes, when the the real wonder is in how everything (earth's location, the sun's size, the elemental composition of the earth, the laws of physics, etc) fit together so perfectly as to result in me answering your questions. That's the design part.
The oceans have BILLIONS of identifiably different viruses ~ where are they coming from?