Forgive me for not using technical terms, but I wanted to answer the question of (how can life be created out of non-living things) that the original poster asked.
To answer that question, one would have to ask what living things are comprised of; and the answer boils down to proteins. Every living organism is a compilation of proteins that serve some sort of chemical function, be it to contract, to warm up, to produce spider's silk, or venom, to conduct electrical impulses, to burn carbohydrates and other food stuffs, whatever the function may be...they are proteins. Proteins are long chains of amino-acids, there are around 25 known amino-acids on the planet; the limit to how many types of amino-acids there can be is based largely on what kinds of chemical elements are in existence on the planet. All amino-acids are comprised of a Carboxyl group (COOH -Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen) and an Amino group (NH2, Nitrogen and Hydrogen); and when they link together in long chains they form the proteins.
You can ask a biologist for the exact terminology, but in the interest of using layman's terms...proteins and amino-acids have predictable chemical reactions with one-another; which have nothing to do with conscious thought. So now we're down to the non-biological level, that is, chemicals which react with one-another because of valent electrons and other physical principles. The question can be asked, how does this non-biological situation suddenly become biological? (and indeed it was asked).
Is there anything you can do to a mass of these non-biological materials (a chemical soup) that would make them arrange in a replicating fashion? For a long time, there was no answer, and everyone assumed that if it was possible at all, it must still be happening everywhere all the time. But it didn't, and life seems to spring only from other life. But geology has indicated that the Earth's atmosphere was not exactly the same, throughout its history. Indeed, early on, it was filled with mostly methane, nitrogen, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and various acids. There were no large quantities of oxygen, and there would have been no ozone layer to block out the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
So some scientists gathered together the various chemicals and substances thought to exist in the early Earth in a controlled environment, then irradiated the soup with ultra-violet radiation. While far from a climactic dawn of little green men; it did show one thing. It showed that due to the influence of ultra-violet radiation, several amino-acids were indeed formed and did group into long chains, forming several simple proteins. The quantities of the chemicals, and the duration of the radiation together were exponentially dwarfed by the duration and quantity of the same factors in the early Earth. The proteins and amino-acids are not, themselves, lifeforms...they are simply the mechanism by which useful in-organic foundations of organic processes came about.
Given the size of the earth, quantity of the starting materials, duration of exposure, etc...a great many more reactions and interactions of chemical constructs and proteins would have progressed. But then you might ask, why doesn't this still happen all over the Earth today? The reason is that most of the ultra-violet radiation is blocked through our atmosphere today, by its composition. Several hundred million years ago, a much simpler lifeform than ourselves existed, whose somewhat rarer descendants are now known as cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, are able to utilize the hydrogen from water to provide energy, and in the process they liberate a great deal of oxygen. The cyanobacteria multiplied in the shallow oceans and produced so much oxygen that it began cutting off the ultra-violet radiation streaming in through the atmosphere. In a way, the cyanobacteria caused a "point of no return" transition in the life on Earth. Before this early Paleozoic era, one could expect new forms to come into existence with quite different characteristics; after that era, life predominantly descended from the major Phyla that survived the transition. Whether you wish to define that as good or bad is up to speculation (more forms tended not to start from scratch at all anymore, yet those that did survive were able to thrive and multiply in ever varying forms referred to in this thread and elsewhere as the Cambrian explosion.
If you wish to be particular about it and demand that experiments be done to show organic processes emerging from the inorganic soup; it is possible. All you have to do is find the funding to acquire 10 billion cubic meters of ocean water filled with methane, carbon dioxide, acids, etc, irradiate it all with ultra-violet radiation continuously for the next 1 million years and monitor all the billions and billions of molecules in the mix along the way. You could ask Jerry Falwell, he seems to be good at finding cash.
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