We live in an age of information. I know there is fake news, but there is a vast wealth of knowledge. You can find almost anything you need to know on-line.  Yet just a few decades ago nobody could even conceive of the internet.

It didn’t happen spontaneously. We got here through the hard work and inspiration of highly intelligent designers and visionaries.

Imagine now a vast cloud of molecules in space, the debris perhaps of an exploded star.  Just a collection of atoms and molecules: hydrogen, iron, oxygen, beryllium, carbon, nitrogen, silicone … a little bit of everything perhaps.  But a vast, lifeless, formless cloud drifting in space.

Imagine that there are no influences acting on the cloud of molecules apart from the forces of physics; gravity, weak and strong nuclear interaction, and electromagnetic forces.

We can imagine that those inanimate forces are sufficient to cause the molecule cloud to collapse into a star and some planets.  Over billions of years, gravity slowly pulls the gases together to form a solar system.

But can we imagine that those basic forces are sufficient to organise the lifeless cloud into a butterfly,  a magnolia tree or a human being?

Can we imagine that those basic forces are sufficient to organise the matter that they act on into the internet?  That the molecules organise themselves unaided into a smartphone, or the Mona Lisa, or a performance of Beethoven’s seventh symphony?

Take a molecule cloud, leave it completely alone for ten billion years, come back and you will find fitbits, contraceptive pills and life-forms intent on destroying themselves and each other.

Just through the laws of physics?

Intelligence creating itself, life with all its complexity spontaneously initiating and evolving.

Just through the laws of physics?

Love,  joy,  purpose existing without any material form that you can touch or measure.  Great stories and legends; “The Lord of the Rings” expressed in a myriad of forms…

All of these, with the only ingredients of a molecule cloud and the laws of physics.  Really?

Or is there something more? 

Something which indwells all of space and time, sustaining matter and the forces that act on it, imbuing form on the formless,  bestowing intelligence and ‘self’ on lifeforms, giving purpose to material and non-material reality.  Intelligence that gives intelligence.  Life that gives life? An eternal ‘something’, or ‘someone’ without cause but within everything?

If I put my pride aside, it seems to me that the universe, life, and love point to there being a supreme and eternal, creating, sustaining and loving God.

Not cheerless physics.