[quote]Are you saying that in order for me to believe in evolution I must believe in abiogenesis?[/quote]No.[quote]Bearing in mind there is no scientific consensus about the origin of life, what exactly do you think I must believe?[/quote]I'm assuming that you believe evolution is not a cyclical process but an ever-changing process that manifested from "simpler beginnings" but somehow (on its own at a random time) came into existence. I assume that you believe that evolution is the answer as to how we have the diversity of living things. I do not know why you think so, but you think this way anyway even though we understand that a finch is a bird and a wolf is a dog. I assume that you neither have a belief as to how everything came into being not an explanation as to how organic life manifested from non-organic material; thus, what you believe is trusted to be true by faith. That's what I'm assuming about you.[quote]I honestly have no idea what you're taking about.[/quote]Replier shows honesty.[quote]How did we get the diversity of life we see today and in the fossil record?[/quote]How did we indeed? Do you agree that life has existed on Earth for about four and a half billion years? Then you must assume that a lot of living things have lived and died. Correct? You yell, "Proof! Look at the fossil record!" and I say, "And? I agree whole-heartedly that the biology of life on Earth was extremely different, and even the Bible dictated that creatures during our 'simpler beginnings' existed, and our diet never consisted of meat until centuries later, but they obviously no longer matter." Then I wonder. Why the controversy? The fossil record shows evidence of only micro-evolution (variations of the same species), but it does not show either branches of at least one species or the high count of transitional fossils for even one species. If evolution does indeed operate over millions to billions of years, is their not supposed to be over at least a million (which there isn't) transitional fossil records per species (or at least for one species)? Evolutionists claim that the process of evolution is in fact very slow and very minuet, but all atheistic archeologists can find are only an acclaimed few and state, "These few (not many) transitional fossils tell us that [insert name of species] have evolved on planet Earth for over millions of millennia." Even Darwin doubted as to the origin of these small minuet changes that were acclaimed to be caused by the present environmental hazards he assumed to be affecting their biology, saying, "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory" ([i]On the Origin of Species[/i], Chapter 6). The study of abiogenesis doesn't even have a conclusion as to the manifestation of organic life from non-organic material, or even a conclusion as to the necessity and development of intelligence (for only one species) and it's irreducible complexity.