I'm sure that Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were well intentioned, but I don't believe they understand life or its origination well enough to perform a meaningful calculation. They could not model the simplest life form because we don't know what that was.

The issue of The Origin of Life and the Theory of Evolution are often confused, often confused intentionally by Christian Creationists. The Theory of Evolution and the The Origin of Life are totally separate issues. And yet Evolution can be an object lesson about a question such as the Origin of Life.

Before Evolution, the notion of the vast diversity of life forms was taken for granted as being an expression of creation. People may have noticed the groupings and similarities, but no religion or philosophy I've heard of went so far as to suggest that all living things were related. That's what Evolution implies and the evidence supports this. Summarizing, we have an unimaginably diverse variety of living things, and that diversity derives from Survival of the Fittest. In the same way, that nucleic acid polymers found a sequence that would reproduce, in the eons of time and trials, only one self-replicating sequence was needed. Our incredulity might be tempered by the example of Evolution. The rules governing the Origin of Life dynamics could increase the probability for reasons we're not aware of.

In no way does not having an answer to the Origin of Life question merit introducing an ineffable spaghetti monster.

But have you taken into account the length of time you were actually throwing dice? Life could theoretically have started millions of years earlier than it did. Also the shape and attractions between atoms involved in forming all the intermediate molecular forms that fit between no life and living, self replicating molecules.

Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University, thinks life started with molecules that were smaller and less complex than RNA, which performed simple chemical reactions that eventually led to a self-sustaining system involving the formation of more complex molecules.
"If you fall back to a simpler theory, the odds aren't astronomical anymore," Shapiro told Live Science.

Anyone who has read Dawkins or knows the basics concerning biological evolution should know that he never said life evolved by random chance. Random chance is an important element in evolution, but it is not the whole shebang. Random mutations of DNA provide the raw material, grist for the mill, if you will, for natural selection, which is a decidedly NON-RANDOM process. Dawkins (and Gould, and Mayr, and Darwin, and many others) makes this very clear. The evolution of living things is a non-random process. Any discussion of the probability of life evolving at random is an interesting footnote at best. Unfortunately it is sometimes used by demagogues in their attempts to discredit established science. Focussing only on the random aspect of evolution is a distraction that reveals a gross misunderstanding of the process.

There is a free course on logic running currently here:
[futurelearn.com]

It could help you understand.

Logical errors abound in your post. A 1 in 1,000,000 chance (or, let's say 1 billion, why not?) is almost a sure thing if there are 100 trillion chances. You assume that there was a single roll of the dice, one chance for life to arise by natural processes, and if it didn't succeed the first time, then some other cause must have been the explanation. The dice were rolled trillions of times, and life may have arisen multiple times before it took hold. But when it did, it was by a natural process.

Bearing in mind that Hoyle was a Steady State proponent and Wickramadinghe pretty keen on panspermia, neither seem be much of an authority for the origins of life on Earth. Fine in its day but no real purchase now. To me Panspermia is the cosmic equivalent to flat earth in that it has no foundation in scientific discovery

First, we do not know what the probability of life arising is. This will be unknown until we start discovering other types of life forms.

Second, I don’t think Dawkins is saying that the probability of life arising on Earh changed because of what is happening in other areas in the cosmos.

The new guy has made one GOOD point: a reason to hold off posting until level 4 or 5.

“He should have then followed by saying that this means there was 999,999 chances in one million that life arose on earth by some means OTHER than random chance.”

This assertion is illogical and the rest of your argument falls flat because of this. You’ve left no room for % chance life does not arise on earth.

For those who can be bothered, and I don't blame you if you can't, here is one of the passages on Hoyle to which this may refer. Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker. "Sir Fred Hoyles memorable misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection. He compared natural selection, in its alleged improbability, to a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and chancing to assemble a Beoing 747. - this is an entirely false analogy to apply to natural selection," The passage does not refer to the origins of life, though in other places Dawkins does make it clear that the extreme complexity required by even simple life, must mean that natural selection got going very early in life's history, and the main theme of the book is devoted to explaining how natural selection differs from random chance, and why the assumption that natural selection is the same thing as chance is wrong. And sadly why theists often deliberately choose to misunderstand that.

Regardless of your take, the lottery winner only needed to try once, and is unlikely to have played anything remotely close to the "odds" in regards to the number of times required to win. Nor did he win by something other than random chance. Odds are a nice mathematical way to describe probability, but not necessarily what happens. Like, odds are, I'm going to Hell?

Actually I have read all of Dawkins books, some of them more than once, and either this is either complete misquoting, complete misunderstanding, or just plain lies. I do not remember Dawkins saying any of those things. Though I do remember passages which could be distorted to be read like that. If these are not just lies, then you need to go back and read Dawkins again more carefully.

It is true that what is evolving on another planet in another galaxy may have no bearing on what is evolving on this planet. I'll give you that.

However, having not read Dawkins explanation I will address the issue given my understanding.

First, who's to say it was entirety random. The Universe has physical laws that apply equally to biology and evolutionary science as well as physics and chemistry. The present hypothesis as I understand it has life beginning at the bottom of the ocean around "black smokers" where nutrient rich mineral is welled up from the mantle. Within that mineral material upwelling were many of the componrnts that would combine to make the first simple RNA structures needed for the reproduction and perpetuation. The surrounding environment was warm and nutrient rich.

Having stated thus, my point was that it wasnt entirely random. The combination of extant conditions were not necessarily unusual or farfetched. Any planet experiencing tectonic crustal formation with a molten interior would potentially carry the necessary elements and they would arise at the tectonic edges as did ours hypothetically.

Like I'm going to believe you over Dawkins.
Near as I can tell, you aren't qualified to demonstrate anyone's "errors", let alone Dawkins'.

Learn to use paragraphs.
All that gibberish you just spewed would be easier (and probably more entertaining) to read, if you tried using proper paragraphs.

No where in that word salad did you make a rational point

Nonsense. You cannot calculate the probability of an event you have no information about.