So What's the Deal with Abiogenesis?

Abiogenesis refers to the origin of life itself. The questions "Why is there life?" and "How could life have arisen from nonlife?" are often hurled at atheists as though those questions alone prove the existence of God or at least of a creator of the deist variety. But that cannot be so. 

I have no idea whether life emerged from inorganic matter or if it always existed in some form (although I've heard that the building block of life has been created from inorganic sources in the lab.) It's not my area of expertise, and frankly I have no incentive to drop everything and study this complex subject. I'm also fairly sure I have no aptitude for the subject either. But so what? I don't need that information, assuming it's available, to live well. I can't know everything, and fortunately I don't need to. So I'm losing no sleep.

But where does that leave atheism? It leaves it unscathed because no believer qua believer really knows the answer either. It is simply no answer to say, "God did it," because that tells us absolutely nothing. We are as uninformed after we've been given that answer as we were before. Translation of this pseudo-explanation into plainer English would be: "A logically impossible 'thing' created life through an indescribable process that, since it is indescribable, I cannot describe." 

You call that an answer? It's no better than "explaining" an amazing feat by Penn and Teller saying they did it with "magic." 

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