I just wanted to bring up a few more things about our universe, with respect to theism, before moving to a new topic.
Have you ever watched National Geographic (especially "Planet Earth"), or looked up at the stars, and wondered if it's possible that everything just happened by chance? Some might argue that it all follows the laws of nature or physics, and that these things aren't accidents at all. But that only raises the questions," Why are the laws of nature the way they are? Couldn't they have been different? Where did they come from?" Some things to think about:
The Earth has one moon, named Moon. (Why don't we have a name for our moon?) Jupiter has 16 moons and 47 other smaller objects that rotate around it; Mercury doesn't have any moons. It's strange to think that we could have had more or none at all, yet one is the perfect number for us. The moon controls our ocean's tides; if it were smaller, the gravity pull would be too weak, and our oceans would be stagnant and not well suited for life. If the moon were larger, we would have frequent tidal waves, making all our coasts inhabitable and ocean fishing impossible; you can imagine what would happen to our oceans if we had more than one moon. Our moon is the right size and distance from us. What are the odds?
Did you know that the Moon is 400 times smaller than our sun? AND, our sun is also 400 times further away from us than the Moon, which allows us to observe perfect solar eclipses; no other planet in our solar system can do this. More importantly, it has been estimated that if the Earth's rotation brought us closer to the Sun by just one mile, it would be too hot to sustain water, and therfore kill all life. Similarly, if we went one mile further away, our water would freeze, making life impossible. As luck would have it, we are the perfect distance from our little star. What are the odds?
Let's think about our star. There are 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. We know of 100 billion galaxies. That puts the number of stars that we know of around ten billion trillion stars. No, that is not a typo. That's 1 trillion, multiplied by 10 billion. What if we had been placed by a different star? The largest known star is called the Pistol star, which has a mass 150 times that of our sun and is ten million times brighter. This star could have been our sun. Out of all the stars in the universe, we just happen to be the right distance away from a star that happens to be the right size. What are the odds?
Let's bring it back to Earth; look at our weather system. Earth has huge land masses separated by a lot of salty water. Our atmosphere pulls up water from the ocean, filters it, and then carries it hundreds of miles over the land and distributes it as rain. The rain makes plants grow, keeping plant-eaters alive, then the meat-eaters eat the plant-eaters, keeping them alive. Lightning causes fires and, where the area is mostly dead, it can cause a lot of devastation. BUT, it prevents overgrowth in the forests, and the fires makes the ground fertile for new growth. Our weather system is automatic Earth maintenance. What are the odds?
The answer? Not good. The odds of all these things coming together is like a giant cosmic consipiracy. Of all the known stars and planets in our universe, we have never found a place like Earth. We have never found any traces of life anywhere in the universe. Some planets look to have once had water, which assumes life, but even these speculations have been questioned. They now admit that these "water-like-impressions" could have been caused by other factors.
If someone were to say that all these things happened by coincidence or chance, it would be followed with laughter. The odds are too great to be left up to chance or coincidence; the only rational alternative is that these things are the product of intelligent design.
