There are numerous possibilities for how life began, and whatever process was involved probably took a minimum of millions of years to lead to something self-replicating and stable enough to start adapting. This makes abiogenesis theories likely impossible to directly test over human time scales.
Not that we shouldn't try... it's possible that certain conditions can give rise to self-replicating molecular systems that can adapt very quickly. This doesn't prove that these conditions were the exact ones responsible on primordial Earth, but it does prove that the phenomenon of abiogenesis is categorically possible under plausible early Earth conditions.
There are lots of other phenomena in nature that may be impossible to directly test. Biological evolution for instance is somewhat testable, but only on a small scale in both time and organismal complexity:
We can also run computer evolution experiments that validate some of the theoretical assumptions underlying biological evolution in a very abstract way, but these can't validate specific biological hypotheses about physical systems.
Not that we shouldn't try... it's possible that certain conditions can give rise to self-replicating molecular systems that can adapt very quickly. This doesn't prove that these conditions were the exact ones responsible on primordial Earth, but it does prove that the phenomenon of abiogenesis is categorically possible under plausible early Earth conditions.
There are lots of other phenomena in nature that may be impossible to directly test. Biological evolution for instance is somewhat testable, but only on a small scale in both time and organismal complexity:
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/
We can also run computer evolution experiments that validate some of the theoretical assumptions underlying biological evolution in a very abstract way, but these can't validate specific biological hypotheses about physical systems.