Science is advancing so fast, that it is difficult to keep up with.  Let me first recommend a great resource, Reasons to Believe, that keeps me abreast of developing scientific news.  It is a must for anyone struggling with this topic.  Most of what I document below will be indirectly from this resource.  Each of their articles will reference academic journals and research throughout its breadth.

http://www.reasons.org

When I was born, scientists thought that life sprang from a primordial soup billions of years ago.  Now scientists realize that there never was a primordial soup to begin life on earth and that life has only existed on earth for about 500 million years.  Hence, atheist posit that life must have been deposited from exterestrial sources.  Scientists also recognize now the difficulty required to make proteins, the basic building block of the cell. Charles Darwin expounded on the difficulties of evolution not explaining the rapid appearance and development of life at certain points in time.  Today, it has gotten more difficult.  Every phyla on the earth appeared 500 million years ago in a period of 3-5 million years.  The neanderthal is no longer assumed to be the direct ancestor of humans.  Ten years ago, scientists believed that only 1% of the human genome was useful and that the rest of it was junk left over from many stages of evolution.  Just this week, scientist now recognized that 80% of the human genome is active and purposeful.  Just twenty years ago, it was assumed that many planets would match the life-sustaining necessities of earth.  Now more and more data is present to support that earth is truly unique, that our solar system is highly specialized, and that our universe is precisely tuned to support life on our planet.   The following appendix lists thousands of fine-tuning examples for our universe, galaxy, and solar system.  The more exoplanets we find, the more unique earth’s situation appears.

http://www.reasons.org/articles/rtb-design-compendium-2009

The data is leaning more and more toward a designer rather than an accident.