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The origin of life itself is not part of traditional evolution theory, which only explains how life (once it existed) proliferated into all the species we see today. However, the origin of living material does not seem all that improbable. Organic compounds -- the building blocks of protiens, have been found on meteorites, and have been located drifting in space. The stuff seems commonplace. Given a planet with oceans of water, plus billions of years, and the way that organic compounds naturally combine, it not only seems likely that self-replicating molecules could eventually form, but -- because we're here -- it's a 100% sure bet that it does happen.

Surely, you must know that you're operating on a sort of religious faith here. You simply lack any proof at all for this speculation. It's the sort of reasoning that has always made evolution the stunted child of science, just above the "sciences" of psychology and sociology and education.

As usual, evolution doesn't explain this ultimate question any better than ID or creationism (which are probably largely the same thing). The shrill whining of evolution missionaries aside, any person can readily observe that the fundaments of evolutionary theory have no sounder evidenciary footing than does intelligent design. To the origin-agnostic observer, neither one looks much like a science.

Most of us wouldn't care to fly on an airplane designed by either the sciences of evolution or ID. Evolution simply cannot compare with the levels of proof we have in physics or chemistry or even in medical science.

Personally, I rather like the ambiguousness of the entire situation. I think it's pretty clear that the energy economy of the universe probably varies by region and that there are some huge discoveries in science that we can't even yet imagine. Unfortunately, the dogmatism in scientific institutions toward some of the more interesting questions makes it unlikely that we'll see significant breakthroughs in our lifetimes. Science has often had sterile patches until basic assumptions are corrected.

I suppose it'll offend you but I rather like that situation. I think the real answers are far stranger and more interesting than anything presently offered to explain the origins of life.

Evolution simply cannot compare with the levels of proof we have in physics or chemistry or even in medical science.

That's true. And it's typical of the historical sciences, such as evolutionary biology, historical linguistics, textual transmission and stemmatics, historical geology, systematics and phylogeny, archeology, paleontology, historical geography, cosmology, and historical anthropology. In such fields, we can't reproduce events which happened in the past. We can only examine presently-existing evidence, and attempt to devise comprehensible, explanatory models that account for the evidence. In any such field, one can claim that aliens in UFOs are responsible for events in the past, but such claims aren't useful hypotheses, as they aren't testable. But a truly scientific model (such as evolution) can be falsified if data are discovered which are inconsistent with the model.