Our friend Steve Collins, a distinguished cancer researcher and professor of medicine, writes regarding the question of Darwin and the creation of life:
Darwin did not concern himself with how life was initially established on Earth but rather his theory explains how life, once established, has evolved on earth. (i.e. survival of the fittest etc.) .
The 19 th century Darwin knew little if anything about primitive life forms such as bacteria, viruses and the chemistry of the "primieval soup". His theory does not touch at all on how life may have been initially established on Earth. Rather he used the fossil record and his own keen observation/intuition to attempt to explain how life once established has evolved into the myriad living forms that presently populate the Earth. There are present theories (all 20th century in origin) that have postulated how the fundamental building blocks of life (i.e. molecules such as DNA and RNA), could have arisen from spontaneous chemical reactions but these are all controversial. There are even theories that such molecules/primitive life forms might have arrived on Earth through meteorites etc. and these latter theories have certainly not been disproved.
So it is important to distinguish the question of how life, once established, evolved on earth (Darwin attempted to do this) from how life developed in the first place (not strictly what Darwin or Darwinism is all about). This is an important distinction since you will notice that in many of the essays debunking Darwin this distinction is not made, and in fact Darwin is criticized because he cannot explain the initial origin of life. He and his theory are not even trying to do this. Indeed Darwin's classic book is entitled "The Origin of Species" rather than "The Origin of Life."
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