sigh....and what (or who) made the soup?
That's not a question for an evolutionary biologist, is it? We're discussing (among other things) whether molecules which were undeniably present in large numbers on the early Earth are capable of having ultimately combined on their own in a way that led to self-replicative structures that over billions of years developed into the vast variety of organisms that we currently observe. Evolutionists maintain that that's what happened, and they're engaged in the huge task of trying to understand as completely as possible how that happened. Intelligent Design proponents maintain (as far as I can tell) that a deity somehow whipped up all of the vast variety of life in a jiffy and made it seem as if it really took billions of years. Mostly, they spend their time trying to think up ways to discredit the work of evolutionary biologists and at the same time avoid tricky questions about the 'young Earth' and stuff like that.
And as for this:
Or are molecules ...... too irreducibly complex to create, especially from scientific facts about conditions that pre-date the "soup"?
Organic chemists regularly construct complex molecules by a variety of processes, for example, polymerization. And in a few years, our nanotechnologists are going to be much better at putting together all sorts of materials, one atom at a time. And, lest you try to push the question back further, transmutation of one atom into another is rather straightforward to accomplish in particle accelerators and the like. And, yes, particles can be produced out of pure energy. But do we produce the energy itself, you ask? That's not the question we're discussing, I say! (smile)
That's not a question for an evolutionary biologist, is it?
This is the same old worn-out rhetoric we repeatedly see from the anti-science know-nothings: that Evolution is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of the raw materials (first living cells).
This is equivalent to standing on a soap-box and screaming that Hydrology is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of water, or that Gravitational Theory is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of mass.
"Hydrology -- a theory in crisis!"
That loud noise you're hearing is the lovely sound of shifting goalposts.