That’s actually not true. There is some evidence that life’s origin, or at the very least the protein constituents of extant cells, ultimately derive from some sort of abiotic chemistry.
Inferences of ancestral nodes in the phylogenetic trees of the oldest (most widely conserved) protein sequences increasingly mirror the abiotic distribution of amino acids produced by nonbiological chemical reactions, as we go further and further back in time. That’s evidence right there that the earliest proteins were synthesized from amino acids that were produced by nonbiological processes, and that the biosynthetic pathways for their synthesis subsequently evolved. The “modern” distribution of amino acids we see in extant proteins increasingly gives way to the nonbiological distribution the further back we go, and larger and more complex amino acids like Tryptophan become less frequent, while the simpler amino acids like glycine, alanine, valine and so on become more and more frequent. This trend increasingly mirrors the distribution expected from chemical thermodynamic calculations of the ease of their synthesis, the distribution observed in various carbonaceous chondrites, and mirrors the distribution also seen in various experiments in abiotic organic chemistry, such as simulated hydrothermal conditions, volcanic and atmospheric spark-discharge experiments, and so on.
See:
Higgs PG, Pudritz RE. A thermodynamic basis for prebiotic amino acid synthesis
and the nature of the first genetic code. Astrobiology. 2009 Jun;9(5):483-90.
DOI: 10.1089/ast.2008.0280
Brooks DJ, Fresco JR, Lesk AM, Singh M. Evolution of amino acid frequencies in
proteins over deep time: inferred order of introduction of amino acids into the
genetic code. Mol Biol Evol. 2002 Oct;19(10):1645-55. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a003988
Jordan IK, Kondrashov FA, Adzhubei IA, Wolf YI, Koonin EV, Kondrashov AS,
Sunyaev S. A universal trend of amino acid gain and loss in protein evolution.
Nature. 2005 Feb 10;433(7026):633-8. Epub 2005 Jan 19. Erratum in: Nature. 2005
May 26;435(7041):528. DOI: 10.1038/nature03306
This ultimately chemical origin of the first proteins is clearly an outcome that is much more expected on the hypothesis that life began through some process of abiotic geochemistry and physics.
Meanwhile in reality there isn’t any evidence that’s impossible.
Even if one discounts the possibility of intelligent design the organization of proteins into cells is dependent on at least two different types of information.
- The physicochemical properties of the molecules.
- The sequence in which molecules are arranged.
Most OOL research is focused solely on the first type of information, as they diligently look for evidence that complex chemistry of cells can form in plausible abiotic conditions, such as proteins, sugars and other chemical substances that the cell uses to function, faster than the environment can decompose them. Which has a sort of reductionist logic to it because only this part of the process of building a cell is reducible to blind physicochemical processes. At present there is no evidence that any environment can spontaneously achieve even that bench mark nor any evidence based reason to believe such an environment has ever existed, as is well explained by James Tour here:
https://inference-review.com/article/animadversions-of-a-synthetic-chemist
All of this is based on the unsubstantiated assumption that life has to begin with a sort of spontaneous self-assembly of a cellular-life form more or less “all at once”, or that there was never any kind of chemical or pre-cellular evolution occurring by which something like extant cells gradually developed from simpler precursors.
Of course, the only way to find evidence that some hypothesized environment existed is to look for it, or try to recreate it in the laboratory and see whether it behaves as expected.
Of course that’s always the case before new and unexpected discoveries are made. Before the process of evolution was discovered, nobody knew it existed. Same goes with things like fission and fusion of atomic nuclei, stellar nucleosynthesis, convection, thermophoresis, and thousands of other processes that we didn’t know existed at various points in history, and for a long time never even dreamt of.
Now of course given what we know of the history of the universe, life must have somehow originated from non-life because if we go back far enough, the elemental constituents of life didn’t even exist.
Going back far enough if you assume life couldn’t somehow arise through processes of mere physics and chemistry, but instead requires some long series of extraterrestrial alien biochemists to create each other, you’re going to run out of time for alien biochemists to exist because at some point the universe was just some hot and dense plasma in which no chemistry was possible. So now your premise runs into a historical problem which presents you with a trilemma:
Either:
A) Your assumption that life couldn’t possibly arise by just physical and chemical processes is wrong.
Or
B) Magical wishing made life arise.
or
C) We’ve got the history of the universe wrong and the history of life stretches infinitely and unendingly far into the past.
Supposing you refuse to budge on A, consider C preposterous, and go for option B, you’re back to the very problem you asserted with abiogenesis to begin with:
I think that it is safe to say that there isn’t any evidence that magically wishing for matter to assemble into life is actually possible.
