[frudi_x]

@Yorick:
so you're saying somebody put the methane, water, carbon dioxide, sulfur, amonia, nytrogen and all the other componets on the primordial Earth?
i would instead put forth that most of these gasses were injected into the atmosphere by the early volcanic activity, which was a lot stronger than in the present. additionaly most of the carbon and water was brought to Earth by comet impacts during the period of the great bombardment (between 4.5 and 3.9 billion years ago).
noone needed to put these components onto the Earth, their presence is an inevitable consequence of the formation of our solar system, governed by physical laws.

of course you will just claim that somebody put just the right abundances of the right gasses into the interstellar nebula out of which our Sun and it's system of planets was formed, to ensure the Earth would eventually form. however, by our current knowledge the formation of planets is a process too chaotic to be predictable in the long term. even if this turns out to be wrong and what seems like chaos to us is actually predictable, the composition of the solar nebula can be explained by activity in it's galactic surroundings in the past (such as supernova explosions, collisions with other gas or dust clouds, passing stars...), which in turn can be explained by events leading back to the formation of the galaxy itself. and if you still want to introduce your beloved creator, we can take the story back all the way to the creation of the universe, or rather the 10^-43 seconds (the so called Planck time) after it's creation. if someone wanted to meddle with the formation process, all they could influence was the initial conditions, the state of that original blob of energy, before it blew up and created the universe. after that, natural laws took over.

and you still don't seem to understand the point of the experiment i was describing. the goal of the experiment was not to prove that life or at least complex organic molecules will form in an environment similar to that of the ancient Earth. the goal was to find out WHAT will happen in those circumstances! as it turns out, the building blocks for life are quite happy to form in those conditions.
of course the experimenters deliberatly mixed up the gasses in the test chamber and deliberatly added an occasional electric charge. how else are you going to create an experiment if not deliberatly? go out and search the entire planet, to see if in some underground cavern chance has created a mix of gasses of the exact same composition with a faulty power line running nearby? we can't exactly go into space looking for another planet that resembles the early Earth either (if we could, we'd be better of just finding another planet with life already on it and that would settle this debate). what we can do is replicate the conditions in a lab as close as our knowledge permits and see what the results will be. that's the whole point of scientific tests!

Which doesn't change my statements that "probably" holds no water. 60% likelihood is still 40% unlikelyhood. There is no guarantee.

as i already said - everything in science is about probability and likelyhood. there are NO guarantees in science. not even 1+1=2 is 100% guaranteed to be true. this is even more evident in physics, where no theory or even 'law' can be said to be 100% true and no piece of data can be said to be 100% accurate. if you can't deal with the remaining unreliability, that is your problem, science will continue to work regardless.

The variables in the earths development are unthinkably large. The rotational axis, the closeness to the sun, the moons effect, the levels of oxygen balanced with carbon dioxide, the heat of the core, the radiation shields in the atmosphere... it goes on and on. All the variables need to be accounted for and tested with and without. Would life have developed if the planet was closer to the sun? But then the closeness creates a whole other set of variables.

you'd be surprised just how many variables are taken into account when planetologists and astrobiologists talk about the requirements for the emergence of life.
for instance, on the question of what would happen if the earth was closer/further from the Sun than it is. well, you just need to look at Venus and Mars to get some idea. if it were much closer the higher temperatures would eventually lead to a runaway greenhouse effect, similar to what happened on Venus. and if it were even closer it would have eventually become tidaly locked in it's rotation, frying one side of the planet to 500°C and freezing the other at -200°C. if it were only slightly closer than it is now, life would almost certainly still develop, however if it were close enough the temperature would become too high before any intelligent life would emerge (that's because the solar luminosity is steadily increasing with time).
if it was further away, there would be an incrised chance of extended polar glaciacion leading to a runaway global glaciation, effectivly freezing the entire surface under kilometers of ice. there is actually evidence that this has indeed happened several times in the past, as recently as some 550 million years ago, yet life was able to survive. the microorganisms of the day were however a lot more resistant to such extreem conditions than the higher life forms of today, so more frequent global glaciation events would regularly eradicate all but the most primitive of organisms. if the earth was far enough even the greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane couldn't raise the temperature above freezing point of water and it's doubtful life would develope without running water.

I am happy not knowing, and exploring what we DO know, and CAN know, while reveling in the mystery. We were not there. We did not see. At most we can speculate on the evidence we have, but what if a key component is missing? Gone?

apperantly for you 'i don't know' equals 'nobody can know'. you should give the scientists some credit, they know a lot more about their fields than you and i ever will. they CAN know a lot more than you, it's just a matter of how well they convey their findings to the general public (something that most scientists unfortunately aren't very good at).

and i will not comment on the science of theology bit, since that would probably lead to this thread being locked.