Hi Cedre,
Firstly, I'm not a scientist, I did not mean to give that impression and I apologise for doing so.
It turns out that the best Mr Jack and his colleagues can do and have been doing since 1882 is twiddle with a series of hypothesises. The question that must be asked after such a long period of time has passed is, have scientist ever regarded the likelihood that evolution as a theory may not be as probable as it is presumed by the larger science community?
1882 seems an odd date? Why 1882?
People have been refining and researching all areas of science for decades, some have shown remarkable success, others less so. None-the-less it is simply not true to say that origin-of-life research has not progressed in the last 127 years. At the very least the problems to be solved have been identified and, in fact, credible solutions to many of these problems have yet to be found.
Mr Jack I fail to understand that in the face of such meager evidence to backup the notion of life emerging devoid of other living matter in vicinty from non-living matter how can you still make the claim
I'm not sure what you see as meagre. We know, with a great degree of certainty life existed on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, and with even more than it exists now. Equally, we know the Earth to be 4.6 billion years ago. Clearly life cannot have existed on the Earth before it was formed, no?
Now if you don't have something at one time, and you do have something at another time, you can say - for certain - that something changed in between. For life, we call that change abiogenesis. That abiogenesis happened is not in question.
As Huntard points out we don't know, for certain, that life first emerged on Earth; it could have come from elsewhere (Panspermia), but Panspermia only pushes the problem to another place and time. Somewhere, somewhen the first living thing had to emerge.
Now, you may protest that we can't be certain that it emerged through naturalistic process. And you'd be right, without knowing how it happened we can't be certain. However, there is a name for finding something and assuming Goddidit - the God of the Gaps. It's not a compliment.