GeneM said: "strictly speaking every time you eat cornflakes, your turning nonliving matter into living matter."
Someone might argue with the above: 'Cornflakes only provide fuel for already living matter.'
Someone else might counterargue that thats just splitting hairs.
The reason I mention this is to propose that the reason there is no satisfactory answers to the original question is because the original question is fundamentally flawed. And that in two ways.
1st flaw: Saying that living things come from non-living. (Or, alternatively, that non-living comes before living.)
2nd flaw: Making a distinction between living and non-living.
Some explanation is in order:
Any attempt to explain where life came from necessarily requires delving into the past and delving into how things are made. At our level of existence, there is a distinction between living and non-living things. There is even a distinction between different classes of living things and different classes of non-living things.
But, according to theoretical physics, everything (eventually) comes from the same source (at the so-called planck level). If my limited grasp of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle holds true, then, the farther you delve into how things are made, the less distinction there is between them. At some point, all things are made from or merge into, the same "stuff." And by "all things" it would include such "things" as light, gravity, the nuclear forces, and so on. (Things that might not normally be viewed as "things.") And so, theoretically, what we call "life" or "the life force" would also come from the same original "stuff." If the theoretical physics hold true, that is. (Here, "stuff" and "thing" are being used for lack of a better term.)
I believe this is what super-string theory attempts to establish.
Again, theoretically speaking, the original "stuff" would necessarily have to have the capability to be 'molded' into all things existing, whether living or non-living. Thus, rendering the original question flawed from the standpoint that it doesn't go far enough back to solve the problem that it raises. The question assumes that the one came from the other. It would be like an American saying he was of Irish descent. That might seem true to an extent, until one starts to wonder where the Irish came from. Asking how life came from non-life limits how far back one can look.
Since much of this is beyond the current observational capability of humans, it would have to remain theorectical (or extrapolated from what can be observed) and would fail to meet the OPs criteria of what constitutes evidence.
Or, to look at it from another angle:
It is thought that much of the universe is made up of something called "dark energy." (Energy inferred by its effects, but otherwise currently unobservable.) If this 'dark energy' actually exists, then, any argument about the difference between living and non-living things fails to take into consideration some of the possible important building blocks, since living and/or non-living things may be partly composed of this 'dark energy.'
To illustrate, imagine if you had a house and beside the house you had all the building materials that went into building that house. But you could only see some of the building materials. It would probably leave you scratching your head trying to figure out how the house got built from the partial list of materials that you could see.
Now look at it from one final angle:
If God exists (and I say "if" out of respect for those who don't agree with that), but, if He did, then, at some point in the past there was only Him. There wasn't Him and a pile of building materials. There was only Him. Everything that has since come into existence would have had to have originated from Him. All the qualities that make up living and non-living things (including both angels and humans) would have had to be part of, or extracted from, His own 'essence.' (For lack of a better word.)
In a sense, this angle somewhat matches the theoretical physics mentioned above. God would basically sit in the same position as the "planck level." God is usually thought of in infinite terms. And matter or energy at the planck level is hypothasized to also be infinite.
With all three of these angles or scenarios (if you will), the real problem is that the original question does not permit a final answer.