The Abiogenesis of DNA: Scientific Law and Semiotics

While some aspects related to abiogenesis have been breached, no one has come close to anything like what you describe in achieving something close to a lifeform, namely, everything happening in an uncontrolled, unprepared environment. In this field of research, scientists invariably intervene in the natural environment, which is how the multitude of advances are made in modern technology in general.

I do not mind in the least inquiring into how things might have happened, but to pretend intervention is not key in these experiments is disingenuous. Remember, Newton's Laws of Motion—I note you like to cite Newton—are squarely aimed at what happens with and without intervention. Man is constantly intervening and inventing, aka designing. This is the nature of scientific advancement. For some reason, evidently tied to worldview, some people can see design in certain scientific achievements—and want credit—yet fail utterly in other similar circumstances.

Actually, many see the design but feverishly endeavor to explain it away. Most skeptics are not nearly as skeptical as they imagine when it comes to philosophical questions regarding origins, which much of this is, and in light of modern discovery, modern atheists have become rather lazy, as their arguments against a Creator have become desperate, bizarre. In fact, they are prone to think they do not have to defend their philosophical worldview, but can just assume it. Talk about unscientific, that takes the cake.

 

Not sure how you managed to miss all of the evidence here, but that response is entirely off base. Earlier you cited Francis Collins, the Christian who headed the Human Genome Project, thus a premier expert on DNA, as someone in your corner. However, he most assuredly does see design in DNA, as he describes in his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Here's a comment on it:

Collins, a pioneering medical geneticist who once headed the Human Genome Project, adapts his title from President Clinton's remarks announcing completion of the first phase of the project in 2000: "Today we are learning the language in which God created life." Collins explains that as a Christian believer, "the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship."​

 

First, you changed the point, which was that Creator God can intervene. This is indisputable. Second, there is no compelling reason to believe scientists will necessarily detect those occurrences when He did intervene, other than to eventually realize the futility of coming up with a viable testable hypothesis based on strictly natural input in those instances. But given the metaphysical lengths some are willing to go to in order to avoid God, such realizations will come individually.

Assertions aside, a strictly natural process leading to life has nowhere been demonstrated, not even close. Whether such will ever be discovered, that is, one that does not rely on highly improbable events, seems extremely dubious at best. Perhaps there is still some hope that man might one day mimic its creation on some level, though extreme skepticism would seem in order even then. This is where I side with you—I'll believe it when I see it. Scientists asking me to just have faith in them until then are barking up the wrong theological tree.

As a preview comparison, just the existence of an earth-like planet capable of sustaining life like us is so highly improbable that there is no good reason to think even one exists, except that we live on it. Hugh Ross' book Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity's Home goes into technical detail about this. I'm reminded of Sagan's laughably non-scientific statement that the probability of life arising on earth was one, since we are here. That diehard optimist managed to spout a remarkable amount of such nonsense, all with a straight face.

The fine-tuning of our universe, galaxy, solar system, and earth-moon is well-known, and more essential parameters are still being discovered. The point is that the design element is evident whether looking at life or non-life. But again, the realization comes individually.