Originally posted by Ekimklaw
Things tend to break down over time. Things tend to degrade.
True, unless things are structured in such a way that if you put energy into them they repair and/or reproduce themselves. The sun is constantly pumping energy into Earth, and the Earth itself has plenty of stored energy in its chemistry and molten core. Life is a process that takes a certain amount of high-quality energy to sustain/perpetuate itself, embedding a fraction of that energy in its structure, while dissipating the rest of that energy into the universe as lower-grade heat. Overall, the disorder of the universe always increases; life accelerates this process, extracting a capability to sustain and create order at the cost of such acceleration of decay. Really, you could think of life as an energetical parasite.
For instance, If I put a pool of "biotic soup" in a bowl and set it in a rainforest, would you say, over time, it would tend to turn into a higher form of life, or degrade into dried mud, or something.
Obviously, there were no rainforests or bowls when life first arose. My favorite theory as of today is that the first life arose around hydrothermal vents in an ocean or a sea (these vents were all over the place back then, as Earth had a very thin crust and a much hotter core, so volcanism of all kind was much more active.)
Obviously, life did not start as life. Merely some organic molecules in solution or even more probably on some catalytic/stabilizing mud/rock/crystalline surface. Molecules were such, and/or assembled in such a composition, that they auto-catalyzed (IOW, were able to create copies of themselves from some basic building blocks floating around, given an external input of energy to drive the reactions -- for example, direct heat from a volcanic vent or such energy previously stored in energy-rich molecules floating around.) The molecules weren't nearly anything as complex as DNA or RNA. Modern, complex biochemistry would have taken some millions if not billions of years of ultra-fast molecular generational turnover to evolve.
How long would it take to evolve upwards?
Oldest known theorized fossils of earliest life on earth date back to around 3.9 billion years. Considering that due to severe orbital bombardment as part of its accretion the Earth was probably not habitable until around 4 billion years ago, then it might have taken some 100 million years for the first primitive single-celled organisms to appear and spread widely enough to have a chance of being fossilized and preserved for us to find. Or maybe it was more like some 400 million years; it's really hard to tell with so little of the original Earth surface from that time still surviving to this day. For example:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast17jan_1.htm
This is the current state-of-the-art knowledge, that is (and the error bars, or uncertainties, are quite large in this case.) Probably with more time we'll know more as more new discoveries are made around the world and better trace detection methods are developed.
How would it exist for billions of years in order to evolve?
Come on, it's life. How does life exist? It feeds, grows and reproduces. Need I go into greater detail?
Would replenishing the bowl of "biotic soup" merely reset the evolutionary stopwatch, or would it help the first batch continue to evolve?
It's not a soup that evolves, it's life. All you need is a pivotal moment when first primitive molecular life is formed. Once life forms, it's no longer just a soup; it is home to a chemically robust, growing, self-perpetuating structure.
Yet some evolutionists want us to believe that this is how life first came into existence.
Ehm, no. That's how you interpret evolution, incorrectly and without any basis in theory or fact I might add. Hopefully my explanation will shed some light for you.
There is only one conclusion. Those who believe this scenario do so as an alternative to believing in God.
There's hardly only one conclusion in this case, as peoples' cosmological beliefs are never so clear-cut. Quite to the contrary, you can believe whatever you wish. Then believing in God is just another alternative. On the other hand, if one wishes to be even the least bit rigorous one would try to postulate an explanation that could at least potentially be feasible within confines of the observable natural world.