The Bible has a story about how life began. You can read all about it in the Book of Genesis. God created life. That sums up the Bible story pretty well!
A recent story in The New York Times outlines evidence that life could have developed on Planet Earth by way of microbes coming from Mars.
If you read that article, and no paywall should prevent you from doing that, please note that this article in The Times does not provide any explanation for how such living microbes might have found themselves on Mars, before their transportation to Earth by way of a cosmic collision between an asteroid and the Red Planet.
So, here's a thought. From the first, human beings have been naturally curious about where they came from, and they have never ceased to think about this topic, and ponder, and experiment, and come up with stories to explain what is, actually, not "explainable" at all. At least, it's not "explainable" if we take "explainable" to mean "provable," and accurate, and clearly "true." An honest evaluation would have to admit that how we came to be, alive as we are, is not anything we will ever be able to "prove."
We do, though, of course, have various "stories," and they all shed some light on the subject. At least, that's my view.
The "scientific story," of which the "Mars microbe" theory might be a part, is that inert matter, at some point (somewhere - and maybe on Mars), was transformed, somehow, into something that could self-replicate, and could "change" and "evolve" in the process of doing that. Self-replication, including the possibility of changes occurring during the process, does, it seems to me, provide a pretty handy way to describe what it means to be "alive." Hence: evolution and our "scientific" story of how we got to be the way we are.
To me, it's pretty obvious that the "scientific" explanation of what "life" is, and how it came to be, is a kind of "story" that is not totally different from the story told in Genesis.
Out of nothing.... something (including life). No demonstrable proof of the actual "cause" of the realities we can track.
Maybe, there is no "Creator," and things have always been that way. We put that "Creator" into the story because we don't have any experience with a world (here, or on Mars, or anywhere else) where things just happen without a "cause" of some kind. Microbes from Mars, mutating on Earth, could be true, I suppose, but those "why" and "how" questions just don't go away. That "Mars microbes" story doesn't really explain anything about those "why" and "how" inquiries, which our hypothetically mutated minds continue to wonder about.
Maybe it's just one of those "Sunday" things, but I'm sticking with the story that includes God the Creator.
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Here's my 2¢ on the subject: "God" is a word that may diminish the concept of God Himself. Perhaps "Truth" is a better way to phrase it. "God the Creator" sounds like a character, separate from creation itself. Truth, or God, has to include everything, by its very definition. The human senses and the human brain can not hold or understand the whole, or even the vastness of space and time. I think all stories are both true and false. True in the sense that they are part of the whole and false because they are only a limited part of that whole. There are some people who do know, but they don't know with their brains, they know with their consciousness, which is quite different.
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