To start with, I have never seen anyone come up with a declaration about the probability of life taking that route as opposed to other proposed explanations for how species came about, how variation in nature came about.
Certainly there could be other streams for life to have taken, as a matter of random chance events. If there aren't then the implications of that, alone, are striking.
I am, though, pretty unconvinced that there is any such thing as natural selection, I think the most probable explanation of it lies in habits of thought which Darwin and Wallace were enculturated into by their having grown up in the wretchedly class saturated, poor-hating hierarchy advancing Great Britain. I think it's worth noting that the proposed earlier inventors of natural selection such as James Hutton, William Charles Wells, and Edward Blyth were, as well, British. I think it is a habit of thought born of people who were advantaged by the very artificial British class system and easily adopted as such by the men and, to a lesser extent, women of that class with their attitudes towards the underclass - the very upper class who ran science and academia and publishing and pretty much everything necessary to promote the British class system as a law of nature.
I would love to see some serious consideration given to a question that has come to interest me more as I've thought about it, how natural selection as an explanation of how things developed as they are now as compared to random chance, itself. Stephen Jay Gould liked to talk about something similar as contingency but he and some others didn't subject natural selection to a test of improbabilities that I've ever found. Even if I believed that natural selection were a real thing instead of a conventionally adopted framing, imposed and maintained largely by convention, ideology and coercion, I would doubt that it as an explanation of why individuals left no or fewer or more offspring (especially based on many of the things artificially isolated so as to be called "traits" for it to work on) would achieve anything like 100% probability in explanatory power. I doubt it would achieve a 1% probability in most cases, if such an estimate could be made. I suspect its probability would be far, far lower than that. In which case, other factors must have been at work in the result that happened, immediately and through time.
One of the Founding Idiocies of Abiogenisis
Specifically, I got a violent objection to this statement:
There is no way for a scientist to demonstrate that those could have formed in that way because every experiment that could be done to prop up a materialist fabulistic narrative of that would be the result of intelligent design. You can't disprove intelligent design through conducting intelligently designed experiments.
It is incredible to me that anyone could object to that. If the answer you are seeking is that something could have happened without the intervention by the design of an intelligent Creator, you cannot ignore that any experiment you design comes to whatever conclusion it comes to through your own intelligence and your own design. You can't leave that fact out of the relevant consideration of the experiment you conduct because your intent made it of the most complete relevance to your effort. You can choose to not mention it or choose to pretend it isn't relevant to your purpose, but it is entirely relevant.
Conducting an experiment to prove that something happened by random-chance instead of by intelligent design can only succeed in proving that you can do something by intelligent design. All experiments are a product of intelligent design, you can't use them to prove something happened by random chance.
It is amazing to me that people who are so conceited about their intelligence could be so stupid as to pretend that isn't part of whatever experiment they design and carry out.
That atheists are still making so much of that experiment that Stanley Miller and Harold Urey carried out about sixty years ago could be proof of the atheist-abiogenisists' desideratum, getting intelligent design out of the problem, does show the limits of intelligence when operated under a strong ideological inclination and emotion. I think that's not unrelated to the first part of this post about why natural selection was adopted and endures.
And not everyone who makes that incredibly stupid step is an atheist, it is endemic to the culture of science. Just through a random google search, the first hit of a site by the National Earth Science Teachers Association that came up says:
Their experiments, along with considerable geological, biological, and chemical evidence, lends support to the theory that the first life forms arose spontaneously through naturally occuring chemical reactions.
I was taught that was what Miller and Ury did, it is still, apparently being taught but it is totally nonsensical and obviously untrue as revealed by the minimum of testing of the claim.
It is remarkable to me that science teachers presumably trained in rigorous analysis wouldn't see, immediately that
a. the condition Miller and Urey created in a lab existed nowhere on the Early Earth, they certainly didn't 1. reproduce the conditions under which life arose and 2. THEY DIDN'T CAUSE LIFE TO HAPPEN OUT OF THEIR CHEMICALS.
b. There was nothing natural and everything artificial about their experimental design. The concentrations of the chosen chemicals they started with in their closed vessel, the temperatures, electrical currents, the timing of those, and myriad other factors which are often proposed to reproduce condition on the early Earth do nothing of the sort,
and,
c. even if they could run an experiment that absolutely reproduced the conditions of the early Earth (just which conditions under which life first arose is unknowable and will certainly remain unknown for the rest of human history) any experiment they did would have created the results it did BY INTELLIGENT DESIGN.
What is unintelligent is any continuing claim that an experiment conducted by a scientist, with a specific result as a goal being claimed to have arrived at a conclusion that intelligence was uninvolved in achieving that result.
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