Transition from chemistry to biology

No, spontaneous generation is when fully formed organisms, usually already well-known species, are produced directly from rotting matter or from non-living matter - maggots from rotting meat, mice from decaying straw, and so forth.

Bacteria are well developed organisms. They are not necessarily the simplest life possible.

Sounds good to me, Loudmouth.

I should also add, that spontaneous generation seems to be the belief that living organisms can arise directly from non-living matter. This is not abiogenesis, since every description of abiogenesis seems to imply that there is a chain of descent from definitely non-living matter to something that we would call living, but the intermediate stages may be hard to classify as either "living" or "non-living". (In this age of mad-cow disease, think prions: is a prion living or non-living? How about an ordinary virus?)

The development of fully formed bacteria from non-living matter would be a case of spontaneous generation, which, as you point out, was discredited by Pasteur. It is not a case of abiogenesis, since none of the proposals for abiogenesis that I am aware of suggests that bacteria ever arose directly from non-living matter.

I have done some research on the topic of abiogenesis, and it seems to me there is virtually no evidence that this is even possible.

I'm afraid that I don't quite understand your objection. If abiogenesis doesn't violate any known law of physics or chemistry, then it must be possible, yes? So the lack of evidence that abiogenesis violates the laws of physics is positive evidence that it is possible. Unless you are using a different meaning for "possible" than I am?

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Speaking personally, I find few things more awesome than contemplating this vast and majestic process of evolution, the ebb and flow of successive biotas through geological time. Creationists and others who cannot for ideological or religious reasons accept the fact of evolution miss out a great deal, and are left with a claustrophobic little universe in which nothing happens and nothing changes.
-- M. Alan Kazlev