Artful Dodger:
Oh, don't get me wrong. An atheist has faith that God does not exist. That is all an atheist can do, because nobody can prove or disprove the existence of God scientifically.

There are certain things that did happen spontaneously in nature. The formation of the stable chemical elements is one. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen adn hydrogen are abundant in the universe. They arise as stars spew out their matter and energy. It all happens in random systems, like the surface of the sun.

It has been proven scientifically that the basic building blocks of life (aminoacids, nucleic acids and carbohydrates) can be spontaneously synthesized in systems that mimic the early conditions of Earth. Abiogenesis ideas such as the "primordial soup" theory have been tested in the lab. The most famous experiment is the Miller-Urey experiment. Its more modern variants have synthesized all of the nucleotide bases in DNA as well as all 22 aminoacids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

If the base pairs of DNA can arise spontaneously, attaching them in long chains was not impossible, and the spontaneous rise of a viable DNA sequence was not impossible either.

Well, ultimately it is faith that determines what people believe. To me, there is more than enough evidence to show that life arose spontaneously without somebody being there to design it. Eventually scientists will acquire the technology and skills necessary to create life in the laboratory. That will put an end to creationism, and the only intelligent design will be what scientists do in genetics laboratories.