Science may not have all the answers, but it has some pretty good ones -- and they work in the real world, be it giving us longer life spans, flying us to the moon or allowing us to communicate instantly to any place on the planet. Faith, on the other hand, gives us nothing but meaningless speculation.

As for the elements-to-life thing, science hasn't totally reconstructed it yet, but here's a reasonable guess at where it will come out: When the Earth cooled and oceans formed, increasingly complex organic molecules formed, combined, disassembled and recombined in different configurations. These were normal chemical activities powered by solar heat or heat from submarine vents. Over the course of millions of years, one of these transient molecules had an unusual attribute -- it had a tendency replicate copies of itself with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Soon, there were a large number of variations of this molecule floating about, and some were better at capturing the raw materials for replication. These survived and created even more copies, some of which were even better at capturing raw materials or were more robust in other ways. Over time, these molecules added complexity, and some of this complexity translated into survival/reproduction advantages. At what point we'd call this stuff life is hard to say, but eventually there were extremely simple organisms that were using internal chemical processes to extend their domain.

Darwin can fill in the rest.