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There have been a number of proposals regarding the '''origin of life''' on earth. However, the various proposals fall into two schools of thought.
One, held by [[Creationism|creationists]], is that life originated divinely/[[supernatural]]ly.
The other school of thought is that non-life became life solely by means of natural processes. This is commonly referred to as ''abiogenesis'' and "chemical [[evolution]]".<ref name="creationresearch.org">http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/36/36_4/abiogenesis.html</ref><ref>http://www.creationbc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=86&Itemid=85</ref> High-profile evolutionists [[PZ Myers]] and Nick Matzke, agree that the origin of life is part of the evolutionary [[paradigm]], as does [[Richard Dawkins]].<ref name="Origin of life">[https://creation.com/origin-of-life Origin of life]</ref> Abiogenesis is only a hypothesis, not a developed or accepted scientific theory.<ref>Origins, Worlds, and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology 2023-2032. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 2023. ISBN 0309475783. "Studies of the chemical origins of life start with the hypothesis that mixtures of simple small molecules under the influence of various energy sources and early Earth environments created the building blocks of life and that interactions among these molecules eventually lead to life itself (Figure 12-2)."</ref><ref name="Luisi"/> High-profile evolutionists [[PZ Myers]] and Nick Matzke, agree that the origin of life is part of the evolutionary [[paradigm]], as does [[Richard Dawkins]].<ref name="Origin of life">[https://creation.com/origin-of-life Origin of life]</ref>
There are two main classes of origin-of-life research: chemical synthesis and molecular assembly.<ref name="Tour"/> The transition from non-living to living has never been observed in the wild or in the laboratory.<ref name="Luisi"/> Nor has self organizing molecules to a living cell have , ever been observed in the wild or in a laboratory either.<ref name="Tour"/>
Committees for the National Academies of Science have observed that chemists have held skeptical views of abiogenesis because of extensive laboratory experience indicating that there are numerous chemical problems that inhibit nature, which has no direction or goal, from synthesizing any complex biochemical molecules that are needed for cellular life to even emerge.<ref name="NAS">Committee on the Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems; Committee on the Origins and Evolution of Life (2007). The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems. National Academies Press. pp. 58–60. ISBN 978-0309104845. "Chemists’ objection to the notion that life is a natural consequence of organic reactivity is simple and comes from broadly based empirical experience in organic-chemistry laboratories. Addition of energy to mixtures of organic species makes the mixtures more complex and less likely to support life. Shapiro has provided a thoughtful and detailed discussion of the difficulties. Briefly summarized, it suggests that existing prebiotic chemistry experiments do not offer plausible hypotheses for routes to complex biomolecules. In the complex chemical mixtures generated under prebiotic conditions, one may be able to find trace amounts of amino acids and perhaps nucleobases. Some might indeed catalyze reactions that have some utility. But other compounds may well inhibit catalysis or catalyze undesired reactions. For example, Joyce and Orgel pointed out that the clay-catalyzed condensation of nucleotides to yield small chains performed best, under the conditions that they considered, if only one enantiomer of the starting material was present. If both were present, the desired reaction with the desired enantiomer might be inhibited by the other enantiomer. Furthermore, the combination of any bifunctional molecule into an information-bearing polymer would be expected to be terminated at an early stage by the presence of an excess of molecules that bear only one functionality. Even crystallization, a well-documented method of obtaining order through self-organization, is not a particularly powerful way to separate mixtures of organic chemicals into their constituents. Normally, an organic compound must be relatively pure before crystallization occurs. That salts crystallize better may explain why crystals are more common in the mineral world than in the organic world. Even organic salts can have problems in crystallizing from an impure mixture. Those facts generate the central problem in prebiotic chemistry. Spontaneous self-organization is not known to be an intrinsic property of most organic matter, at least as observed in the laboratory. It can be driven only by an external source of free energy that is coupled to the organic system."</ref> Among the most common problems in prebiotic chemistry is the fact that origin of life research and experimentation relies on so much human intervention and fails to provide evidence for abiogenesis as a result of reliance on such frequent intervention.<ref name="Tour">James Tour, Charles B Thaxton, Walter L Bradley. 2020. The Mystery of Life's Origin. Discovery Press. ISBN 1936599740. 13. We're Still Clueless About the Origin of Life</ref><ref name="Richert">Richert, C. Prebiotic chemistry and human intervention. Nature Communications 9, 5177 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07219-5</ref>
