For most atheists, no, of course not. The question is loaded (starts with one or more non-stated assumptions accepted as true).

This question is assumes a dichotomy between purposeful design and accidental happenstance. The implication is that because an event is an accident, it is not supposed to happen, otherwise. Questions like this are an attempt to make the atheist appear foolish for believing in something so improbable.

For instance, the idea is that if life is an "accident", then it is a fluke so beyond the chances of winning the lottery, that it must have been guided, because there's no way it could have happened on its own.

A third possibility exists: predictable result

That is to say, it is neither an accident nor a intelligently guided process that water vapor turns into snow during the winter. It is to be expected, given the starting conditions. In fact, this occurs with predictable regularity.

One can follow successive steps after the big bang until today:

  • Lots of hydrogen is floating around the universe, which begins to condense together and ignite into stars. This is predictable simple physics.
  • Stars, through nuclear fusion, begin to produce heavier elements. This is predictable nuclear physics.
  • The stars eventually nova as they run out of fusible material, spreading the heavier elements around (oxygen, carbon, iron, etc.) This is predictable physics.
  • The heavier elements consense into accretion discs, like the stars did, to form asteroids, planetoids and planets. This is predictable cosmology.
  • Et cetera.

Follow this chain of events, and you'll eventually get to the spontaneous production of amino acids (which some kinds have been reproduced in the Miller-Urey Experiments), and on to proteins, protein bubbles, and beyond.

Obviously, some spots of the timeline aren't well understood yet, however, the point is that no step along the way is in any way an "accident". They're predictable results given the starting conditions.

...meaning, it should happen. We don't yet know how, exactly, how abiogenesis happened, but atheists tend to believe it is likely a natural, predictable result like any of the other steps that we've investigated thus far.

Abiogenesis may turn out to be just as inevitable of a result, as hydrogen igniting into stars.

Edited 14 times - Last Modified Dec 19, 2012