0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Oy! 🤦‍♀️ Let's do some math to get this number into a form that we can understand and work with.

There are exactly 31,557,600,000 milliseconds in a Julian year in astronomy which is defined as exactly 365.25 days.

Our available time for evolutionary processes translates to:
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400,000,000 years x 31,557,600 seconds = 12,623,040,000,000,000,000 microseconds

And, well, you hopefully get the point. Even if we cycle through the available sequences at millisecond speed we will only sample a TINY fraction of what is necessary for life to have evolved on its own.

1.0260699444236031677449413559454e-884 sequences will be missed to be exact.
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Even if the whole surface of the Earth were a vast set of tiny laboratories operating perfectly for hundreds of millions of years (!) we still aren't getting that number down far enough or fast enough. The total surface area of the Earth is 509,600,000 square km. This translates to 509,600,000,000,000,000 microns.
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Time x Surface Area

12,623,040,000,000,000,000 ms x 509,600,000,000,000,000 microns = 6.432701184e+36

Minimum Size Self-Replicating Molecule / Earth's surface as a set of tiny laboratories

1.2302319221611171769315588132768e+903 / 6.432701184e+36 = 1.9124655210490143870042989599512e+866
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Or instead of the Earth's surface you can substitute that many coexisting Earths each trying to birth life. Scientists estimate that there are 200 billion galaxies in the universe. That's 200,000,000,000 or 2.0e+11. With 6.432701184e+36 simultaneous "laboratories" working in parallel that's enough for more than 3 Earth-like planets in every galaxy.

In short, there just isn't enough time. Or planets. And we're GREATLY skewing the odds in favor of natural processes to the point of absurdity.
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So, it didn't happen this way. The math tells us that the chance life happened naturally is virtually zero. Now if you think that this is how it happened--how it must have happened!--then you have placed your faith in a scientific process. How is that any different from me placing my faith in a Creator God? BTW, my belief simplifies everything. Believing that there is a God removes the element of random chance which is required for all natural processes.
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All that math I did doesn't matter if there is someone powerful enough to orchestrate these things. Or has the ability to create at will. BTW, there are multiple creation viewpoints. The most common is Young Earth Creationism (YEC). This is the position of most christians, sadly, and is filled with #pseudoscience like the belief that the earth is only around 10,000 years old. I'm an Old Earth Creationist (OEC) which is not built on pseudoscience.
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People who think God used evolution to create life are Evolutionary Creationists. And there are others. All of them are based on real world science except YEC.

Let's talk about #Faith for a moment. Faith isn't something restricted to religious expression. Faith isn't rare and is never blind. We all use faith every day. All of us. Because no human has perfect knowledge, we go about our daily lives trusting that things will go a certain way.
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Whether that is trusting a spouse not to cheat or sitting down in a chair before we've tested it thoroughly to know if it will hold our weight or not. Faith is common. Sherlock Holmes popularized the notion of deductive reasoning but there is a related type called abductive reasoning. This is often defined as "inference to the best explanation". In other words, this is faith or something very close to it.
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e.g., My wife hasn't cheated on me in the past so I believe / I have faith / I infer that she will not cheat on me in the future.

Now, there is another way to resolve the problem of random chance. Scientists have been, shall we say, uncomfortable with the idea that the universe had a beginning for decades because of the implication that there has to be something--or someone--outside the universe to get it going.
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After all, scientists are human beings complete with all their faults, fears, and biases. Many humans are uncomfortable with the idea of a supreme being who might sit in judgment over them. So, some of those human beings, who also happen to be scientists, have looked for anything which might contradict the implications of a beginning or offer an alternative theory for decades. The current best alternative is the #ManyWorlds hypothesis better known as the #Multiverse.
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If all possible realities exist, then of course the universe we are in must have been one that randomly got it right. This is science fiction because there is no hard evidence for it. However, it is regarded as science fact in some circles. So, I ask you: how much faith does it take to believe in a multiverse?

And now we come to the end of our scientific journey to a strange conclusion: every position taken on the issue of the origin of life results in having faith in something or someone.
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There is no neutral position. Following the #Science leads us to #Faith. Personally, I regard the multiverse as science fiction because it is. If anyone is honest with themself and accepts the conclusions of modern science, then concluding that there must be a Creator God behind the curtain becomes the most rational choice based on science.
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I leave you with these words from Arthur Conan Doyle as spoken through that most famous of detectives Sherlock Holmes:

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Thank you for reading.
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---

Note that everything in this thread has been greatly simplified--to the point of absurdity--to give evolution every possible advantage:

* I used the lower estimated limit as the minimum size for a self-replicating molecule but this really is a rock-bottom estimate. Almost all viruses are larger than this and scientists are split on whether they constitute life given their nature and function. Genome size starts going up very quickly the more complex life gets.
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Bacteria range in the hundreds of thousands of base pairs so is a mere 1,500 really realistic? In all honesty, no.

* It's not really 4 ^ 1500 either. Each of the 4 bases is actually a complex molecule composed of a nitrogenous base, a pentose sugar, and a phosphate. These nucleotides are a complex sequence of atoms themselves so the number represented by 4 should really be 91 ^ 32, more or less.

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There are 91 possible elements naturally occurring in the universe and I counted 32 elements in Adenine. Thus, the actual equation would be (91 ^ 30-something) ^ 1600. Note that this probably represents a maximum estimate. Reducing all of this to a mere 4 has oversimplified this layer of complexity to an absurd level.

* We are ignoring the formation of amino acids entirely. Scientists do not know how any but the simplest amino acids form in nature.

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* We are also assuming a perfect, primordial, prebiotic soup of ready-to-go nucleotides existed for a period of 400 million years (Miller-Urey Experiment). We are ignoring how they were maintained for 400 million years without breaking down and with no mutations or mistakes. We are ignoring how they were formed before there was cellular machinery to form them.

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@danielbsmith Meaning no insult, you've adopted any number of "simplifying" assumptions that are trivially demonstrated to be invalid.

DNA is "self assembling" , and randomized combinations, w/r/t living organisms take, in essence, zero time to discard.

Once you have one bacterium... that reproduces, asexually, every... 30 minutes, say. inside of a week, you'd be running *billions* or trials, in parallel.