One interesting thing about origin-of-life research is that scientists tend to divide into two camps on this subject: what I would call necessitists and contingentists.The Necessitists put their faith in the existence of laws which, as far as we know, have never been discovered whereas Contingentists put their faith in pure chance and serendipity.
Necessitists claim that given the laws of nature, the origin of life from chemicals is inevitable. Life is necessary, not in the logical sense, but in the nomological sense, that is, the laws of nature make it unavoidable that life will originate.
By contrast, contingentists maintain that the origin of life is an enormous accident, an event so improbable that it is unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the observable universe. The sufficient conditions for the origin of life on Earth just happened to come together against all odds.
The contingentists criticize the necessitists as holding to a sort of closet theism: a God has written the origin of life into the very laws of nature. The necessitists accuse the contingentists of making the origin of life into a miracle.
So both sides accuse each other of holding surreptitiously to belief in God—which is the mortal sin in these discussions!
Realizing this distinction between necessitists and contingentists helps us to understand why some scientists speak so confidently about the inevitability of the origin of life from chemicals: they are committed to the view that life is necessary, even though there is no scientific evidence for this claim.
Instead, most researchers recognize that the origin of life on Earth is a highly improbable, singular event.
If blind faith is belief in something for which there is no evidence then both Necessitists and Contingentists must possess an extraordinary amount of blind faith.
