Sure it does. We just have lots of evidence that it hasn't happened in the last few hundred million years. We also have reason to believe that any chemistry that might move toward life would be consumed as food by existing things.
I am just amazed at the lengths you will go to avoid admitting that the quotation was fabricated out of thin air. I don't have time right now to detail how silly this quote sounds when attributed to Darwin, but here's a down payment:
The modern science of abiogenesis addresses a fundamentally different question: the ultimate origin of life itself. Pasteur had proved that abiogenesis was impossible for complex organisms. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution put forward a mechanism whereby such organisms might evolve over millennia from simple forms, but it did not address the original spark, from which even simple organisms might have arisen. Darwin was aware of the problem. In a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker of February 1 1871, he made the suggestion that life may have begun in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, [so] that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes". He went on to explain that "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." In other words the presence of life itself prevents the spontaneous generation of simple organic compounds from occurring on Earth today - a circumstance which makes the search for the first life dependent on the laboratory.Source
Making a poster bow down is tiresome and distracting. But you are welcome to retract your claim that Pasteur said "absolutely nothing about biogenesis." You could be the model poster.
For years around here the evolutionist side of the debate insisted that abiogenesis was NOT part of the theory of evolution. The source information and analysis backed up the assertion quite well.
Darwin neither asked nor answered the question "what is life v non-life/death in nature". He didn't offer a theory of abiogenesis. He took life as a "given" and addressed the speciation. As I summed it up earlier:
What's the deal, PatrickHenry? Has the evolutionist side of the debate now switched horses and accepted the assertion of the numerous (and now banned) posters who argued too passionately that abiogenesis was part and parcel of the Darwin's theory of evolution (and therefore theologically speaking, completely unacceptable to every Abrahamic religion?)
The Hooker letter did not publicly surface until 1950. It is doubtful that Darwin took this speculation seriously, since he never put it in any of his published works. And from what he does include in his published works, it appears the origin of life was not a problem he engaged in his evolutionary theory.
Methinks you wish to keep the door open for abiogenesis, though as a Darwinist you aren't "required" to.