Then you know where I stand in your view. God of the gaps.
Now can you address origins?
No. Does my position collapse if I don't know everything?
In "The Ancestor's Tale", I believe, there is a hypothetical way it could have happened. Amino acids can act as a catalyst - making chemical reactions occur much faster, but without being used up. For example, you can have an amino acid that takes molecule A and molecule B and joins them to form molecule C. Without this amino acid, the reaction to make C would be very slow, but this amino acid speeds up the process. Because it takes molecules A and B to make C, we might call this amino acid Abcase.
Now, what if molecule C and Abcase are the same thing? Each time an abcase joins molecule A to molecule B, it's making more abcase. It's replicating itself. And any subtle changes could make abcase more efficient or less efficient at replicating. And thus natural selection would act, and abcase would evolve. But the starting point - a few amino acids - are easy to get from non-living materials.
So we could start with non-living materials, which form amino acids, which then form replicating molecules, which are acted on by natural selection and evolution. It is then quite plausible that as they improved themselves (the whole natural selection bit), they started using other molecules, eventually getting to RNA and then to DNA. And whallah! Life!
Hypothetical, of course, but completely plausible.
