Cofty: You might be surprised to learn just how much progress has been made in abiogenesis. Some really promising work being done by Nick Lane of UCL and others on bioenergetics.
I'll look them up. The concept of abiogenesis has fascinated me ever since I read of a Scottish scientist back in the late nineteenth century who claimed to have done it. Most people now think it was a hoax, as his experiments were never reproduced, but it the nonetheless sparked my interest. Creationists argue that there is no way something as complex as a cell could spontaneously assemble itself, yet Lynne Margulis' endosymbiotic hypothesis was proven beyond any doubt once mitochondrial DNA was discovered and compared with the DNA of modern bacteria. Cells did not spontaneously assemble themselves, nor were not created in their modern form by God, they evolved from simpler components, just multicellular organisms later evolved from them.