We're looking this week for ways to respond to militant atheism by constructing reasonable arguments for God's existence. We've seen that reasoning from creation to a Creator will not be compelling for someone who thinks that the universe came to be through natural means, or that history moves in a never-ending circle.

What about the design of our world? Surely it indicates a Designer. (Scholars call this the "teleological" argument, from the Greek telos for "design" or "end.") As I write these words I can look outside my window at trees which occur by natural processes. But then I turn from nature outside to the world inside. I find a ceiling fan spinning around the lamp illuminating the room. I am sitting in a leather chair at a wooden desk, typing on a laptop computer. I can't imagine that anyone would think the fan just "happened" to be here or that my laptop is the product of random, chaotic chance. How much more complex is the world than a laptop computer?

Once we start down this mental path, we can find examples of remarkable design nearly everywhere we look. In one famous example, Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle calculated the chance possibilities that life arose spontaneously as one in 10 to the 40th degree (1 followed by 40 zeroes), which Hoyle likened to the probabilities of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and creating a Boeing 747.

Advocates of this approach claim that the universe is not nearly old enough for life to have evolved naturally. The odds that our present world could have come to by through random chance are too small to be plausible, they say. But there's a big "but."

The easiest way for an atheist to respond to the design argument is to invoke Darwin's assertion that life evolves through natural selection and survival of the fittest. In this view, life did not come to be as a tornado spinning through a junkyard. Rather, we evolved through a process which chose the parts needed to make that Boeing 747. The odds of random occurrence are said to be irrelevant in a world which evolved through natural selection.

Some evolutionists even assert that natural selection must have created life as we know it, that the odds were much higher in favor of life than against it. While it would have taken much longer than 14 billion years (the current estimate for the age of the universe) for life to have evolved randomly, this is not how things happened. Natural selection "sped up" the process, we're told. How should we respond? Let's continue tomorrow.