I've several times in recent posts made the claim that scientists have no idea how life could have arisen through blind, undirected processes like chance and the laws of chemistry.
The folks at Lad Allen have put together an eleven minute video which starkly illustrates the difficulties any such theory of the origin of life (abiogenesis) must surmount in order to be plausible.
They discuss the probability of getting just a single useful medium-sized protein purely by the action of mindless chance, and it turns out that you can't. It would quite literally take a miracle, and, as is mentioned at the end of the video there's a huge gap between having a single, medium-sized protein and having a living cell that has the ability to metabolize nutrients and reproduce itself. The simplest living cell requires hundreds of different proteins whose functions all must be coordinated by some sort of information software, and no one has any idea at all where that comes from.
The task of discovering how nature, unaided by intelligence, could have accomplished this astronomically improbable feat seems hopeless, and one feels for those researchers who have spent their lives trying to come up with the means by which nature could've accomplished it, laboring all the while under the conviction that it surely must've happened somehow.
Perhaps it did, but no one who has ever placed a bet on anything would ever wager on something so staggeringly improbable as what's depicted in this video:
