They have gone so far as to suggest that life originated by means we can barely imagine tens of billions of years ago, and possibly even in other universes or other dimensions far removed from this universe.
Life moves a piece at a time, and enhances whatever other life it encounters. This includes improvements on the genome. Since life is structured, these "improvements" would be taken by the improvident to develop a belief in "evolution".
there are both religious and non-religious folks who believe the evidence is there to demonstrate panspermia - the migration of life in and through space to other worlds - one of which is our own.
panspermia and evolution are compatible theories. for many evolutionsist it is still an open question whether "there's been enough time" for the level of complexity we see in the world to have emerged in the time allowed since the earth's surfaced cooled. in particular there are some difficult odds against creating the powerful replication and error correction machinery we see in DNA. To say that perhaps evolution needed more time, and that the DNA machinery in particular probably evolved elsewhere as a very low probability event unlikely to be replicated on any given planet, is not in any way a refutation of evolution. Quite the contrary.