Oh, the irony of it all! Craig Venter, creator of synthetic life, indeed a title to be proud of. To have been able to do that, scientists had to reverse engineer the coding of existing life. The same goes for the Urey Miller experiment. "Even if you were to make a reactor in the laboratory, and put hydrogen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen in one end, and out pops something like Escherichia coli at the other end, you still couldn't prove that we and our ancestors arose that way. You'd just have a narrative that made it more plausible."
Even if above process could be duplicated in a lab, Dr. Michael Russell of the Scottish Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow would be the creator of a new E. coli. Take note, a creator is needed to create a basic organism. And Cofty’s arguments of things being systematically built up, piece by piece, do not hold water. Even simple organisms are very complex. And what I know of nature, things tend to break down. Atoms and molecules do not spontaneously form complicated proteins (even if you allow for millions of years to pass).