The first life

Not really. All that Pasteur proved was that it doesn't happen with nearly the frequency that was assumed under the current thought; i.e. that rotting meat was all you needed to give rise to maggots, etc. He never proved that it can't happen. It's not that it happens once, and never again. It's that once it happens - once life really takes off - it can never happen again. Proto-life can't compete with real-life, and so it never gets a chance.I would have thought this was obvious.

Except, of course, for the one that begins "In the beginning". That's as it may be, but luckily for knowledge you don't have to Understand anything to do science. That's the beauty of empiricism. Not since Aristotle have we labored under the misapprehension that we have to big-U Understand (or, if you prefer, "grok") something to know what it does, or how it affects other things.So really your objection is rather pointless. Nobody is pretending to grok the nature of life, or even it's origin. We're simply looking for an explanitory model that doesn't conflict with the data. Unfortunately your Christian God hypothesis doesn't fit that bill; there's too much contradictory information, not least of which is the non-existence of God.

I assume it is, or starts, anyway. Then I assume that it gets its butt totally kicked by already-existing life, which has spread out to every possible niche and is strengthened by a billion years of competition. There's just no way that a proto-life replicating molecule could gain a foothold in a world that already has life.Then again such a molecule could survive by replicating in cells. Perhaps prions and viruses are the result of separate abiogenesis events after the formation of life.