Life is often portrayed as spontaneously arising

Life is often portrayed as spontaneously arising from some sort of "primordial soup". There it is ... quiet, tranquil, warm nutrients in a primitive sea, a lightning strike in the distance is imparting the energy of life ... soon life will be emerging to the shores... Hold it, not so fast here! To go from a barren lifeless planet to a one filled with living things, we would have to pass through a number of stages:

1. EARLY ATMOSPHERE -
For starters we need a favorable environment for life to evolve and be sustained.
2. SIMPLE ORGANIC MOLECULES -
We need a means of constructing the building blocks of life.
3. LARGE MACRO-MOLECULES (proteins, DNA, RNA, etc.) -
Some the simple molecules must be assembled into biologically useful large molecules.
4. BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS -
Biological systems such as energy conversion must be constructed.
5. LIVING CELL -
And finally, all these molecules and systems must be assembled together to form a highly complex living cell.

When each of these steps are examined scientifically, we see that each has tremendous problems and requires large leaps of faith to believe that they ever happened. To explain the origin of life by non-supernatural means we must have a plausible explanation for each of these steps. An artist's conception of lighting striking a sea of organic soup and then jumping to self-replicating life is woefully inadequate. In fact, it is very misleading.

Although the origin of life by mechanistic means is routinely taken for granted by the popular press, it is, in reality still a mystery to evolutionary scientists.

Source - http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/ol0.htm