Well? Is this the most commonly accepted scientific explanation? Are there other non-religious hypotheses?
Fight my ignorance, Dopers (and Really Not All That Bright’s, too, and I bet a bunch of other people’s).
Well, it’s not quite that simple - certainly, while there is an element of chance, the nature of chemistry makes the whole process decidedly non-random. Some reactions are more favoured under certain conditions than others, for instance. Also, the existence of an inorganic substrate (clay minerals are a current favourite, but also sulphides at black smokers) could act as a surface of reaction and model for replication, and influence the process in a non-random fashion too. But basically, yes, it’s not so hard to imagine. I mean, we know the basic building blocks of life like amino acids exist everywhere, even in deep space. It’s less complicated to work back from those to a production factory like DNA (RNA first, probably), rather than start from scratch with just inorganic molecules and come up with RNA that then produces amino acid chains.
For the record, Creationism is an abiogenetic theory, too. The only other alternative is to assume life has always existed.
As for the scientific version of abiogenesis, as MrDibble states, chemistry makes it decidedly non-random. This fact didn’t entirely hit home for me until I was taking a geology lab in college. There are amazing abiogenetic molecular structures being formed every day, resulting in complex combinations that can be reliably predicted and observed. Seeing the very non-random, very physical results of what happens when elements are brought together by chance gave me an opportunity to better understand chemistry and how it relates to all things in a concrete way. One good example here is cleavage. Because of how minerals are bonded together, many of them will cleave along certain planes depending on what they are. That means that if you break up a large block of mica, it will tend to form sheets because of how it breaks, which is a result of how its atoms are arranged. This is a basic, physical property of minerals and is so reliable that it’s one of the identification tools used by geologists.
Now, life is a bit more complex than mica, but it didn’t start out that way. It started in the same way that rocks did: under certain conditions, some atoms will come together to form molecules. In the case of life, at some point those molecules because self-replicating. There are several hypotheses around abiogenesis right now. The one most commonly cited is the RNA world theory, but there are more.
Then you’ll love Bismuth crystals , given the right conditions they grow like that on their own, simply amazing.
I think this video sums things up quite nicely, if you gloss over the Christian/Creationist equivocation.