How Do Scientists Think Life Originated?

Since most scientists are secularists (rather than Christians or theists) who very assiduously exclude God from their scientific work, I think that probably the vast majority of origin of life researchers are confident that in some way, we know not how, the chemicals that were present on the prebiotic Earth around 4 billion years ago self-organized into the first living things, some sort of a single-celled organism. Now, they will admit that they have no idea how this could have happened. They are confident that the simple organic chemicals were present on the prebiotic Earth, things like amino acids, nucleotides, saccharides or carbohydrates, and fatty acids, but they do not understand how these assembled themselves into the large macromolecules that are the essential building blocks of life. And then it almost goes without saying that they have no idea how these chemical macromolecules could have assembled to become a living cell. And so the whole discipline is really shrouded with what one author has called "an aura of impenetrable mystery." And he interestingly enough distinguishes between a mystery and a puzzle. He says a mystery is something that cannot be solved within the framework of currently understood science and its principles, whereas a puzzle is something we may not know the answer to but we can work out. So he thinks the origin of life is a mystery. In fact, he says at one point in the book, “At this point I must simply wave my wizard's wand to hurry us on to the first existing cell and its evolution.” It's magic! And yet this same author expresses his great confidence that there is a purely natural pathway to the origin of life, unassisted by divine providence, unguided by some cosmic intelligence – a sort of faith commitment of the secularist. And I think that that probably would represent the majority view today – that life originated naturally from these prebiotic chemicals, but we do not have any understanding of how this took place.