You know most atheists concede that life exists, but will stop there. Life, as they see it, arises in an unpredictable pattern. After the individual components of an organism come together, the organism becomes more than the sum of its parts, making it “living.” They take it on faith that life spontaneously occurs, requiring no physical explanation. This type of faith is reflected in their attempts at reproducing life in an artificial context. So far, all such attempts have been limited to the replication of the structures found in living organisms. Because scientists don’t know why life happens, the best they can do is try to reconstruct what they know to be alive.
I have a hard time, however, accepting anything without explanation. With life, we don’t have a case of Timon wondering what those “sparkly dots are up there.” While science will later show that those dots are indeed, as Pumbaa rightly suggested, “balls of gas burning billions of miles away,” life will never have an entirely physical explanation. So while an atheist might accept life without any rigorous justification, I believe that an explanation for life exists. Particularly, it might be found by considering its origin.
One of the fundamental intuitions of science is that nothing happens without reason. In fact, most of science consists of discovering the reasons behind various phenomena. So how and why does life come about? The rational answer would be that it was caused by some force independent of the life we experience. Just as a rock does not cause itself to roll down a hill, nor does a house build itself, so our existence must have been caused some force other than ourselves. What then, is the origin of that force? Or even the origin of the origin of that force? At some point, we must come across something or someone with no defined origin, and whose existence spans all time. I believe Him to be none other than God.
So living in a rational universe, we suppose that the universe must have a creator. It is important to note that this conclusion relies specifically on the rationality of the universe, one in which things do not happen without explanation. And it is just as important to note that the universe does not have any obligation to be rational. Albert Einstein once remarked that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” Given a chaotic universe where things happen without reason, life, also, would need no reason. But the universe is indeed rational, and this life that we take for granted does not randomly come and go. Both were created by a creator who is living (for He created life), rational (the rationality of creation reflects the rationality of its creator), and timeless (for such a creator can have no defined beginning).
Scientists already believe in the existence of invisible, unobservable, forces (consider dark matter and dark energy), so the existence of an invisible God should not be discounted simply because we cannot see Him. For without Him, the miracle of life remains an inexplicable phenomenon.
Just as we are able to make our own decisions in this world, not being slaves of physical laws, God, in whose image we were created and being infinitely greater, is not only free of the physical laws He himself created, but above it. Is it so hard to believe in the resurrection of the dead, when the life of those already living is already an incomprehensible miracle?
Conclusion As René Descartes declared, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). But how are we? The only other alternative to a faith in a rational creator is an unspoken acknowledgment of the current state of affairs. It requires a blind acceptance of a rational universe, a tenuous recognition of free will (something whose explanation we are as close to discovering today as we were one thousand years ago), and a bleak acquiescence that life is nothing more than a mysterious, but meaningless, phenomenon.
I believe, however, that we were taken “from the dust of the ground” and that our life was “breathed into [our] nostrils” (Genesis 2:7). We are more than a bag of bones, more than a lump of muscles poked and prodded by the whims of circumstance. Just as we control our bodies, and our thoughts, God controls this universe. For “through him, all things were made” (John 1:3). He created the universe, and he existed before the universe. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17)
