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Thank you for sharing your insights, dear brother in Christ!

I know of no one in my age group who does not recall abiogenesis being taught as part of evolution theory.

But, of a truth, Darwin never asked or answered the question "what is life?" He never theorized about abiogenesis openly possibly because it would have been professional suicide in the religious climate of his day to theorize a Godless origin of life. As I recall, his mentioning of a warm little pond was in private correspondence.

Further I suspect the educators of my day expected abiogenesis to be quickly proven owing to the success of Urey/Miller (circa 1953) in simulating lightning strikes to bootstrap amino acids. But the Urey/Miller experiments went no further than amino acids.

They of course did not have the whole story. About the same time, Crick/Watson discovered information in life, i.e. DNA. But neither did they at the time understand the full import of information theory (Shannon, 1948) to molecular biology.

Only recently, circa 2002, have we seen empirical evidence in the Wimmer experiment which bootstrapped the polio virus under laboratory conditions.

Wimmer began with the information sequence of RNA which he synthesized to DNA (because RNA cannot be synthesized) and then synthesized the message from DNA to RNA. When he added the message to a cell free juice, it began transmitting and duplicating.

The bottom line is that information (successful communication) is at the root of life v non-life/death in nature and thus any theory of abiogenesis. And science (owing to its self-imposed restriction of methodological naturalism) has determined no materialistic origin for information in the universe.

For the Christian, the answer is obvious. Jesus Christ is Logos, the Word of God.

he heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [There is] no speech nor language, [where] their voice is not heard. - Psalms 19:1-3

To me it is much like the 1960's measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation which established (and continues to establish by measurements since then) that there was a beginning of real space and real time.

To paraphrase Jastrow's observation of that as the most theological statement (there was a beginning) ever made by science: when science climbs that last mountain of scientific knowledge, it will find the theologians sitting there, waiting for them.

BTW, even the cosmic microwave background radiation records the pressure waves or sound in the early universe when photons decoupled from "electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.”

But science as a discipline cannot see what the Christian sees. But of course, Christians who are scientists do see this.

At any rate, the educators of today seem to have been backpedaling on their inclusion of abiogenesis in evolution theory for quite some time now.