If you think that you are an open-minded person and you will believe in God if somebody can show you some evidence, but you don’t want to hear anything relating to the Bible, you might be interested in the following passages.
     Are we products of random, directionless, and meaningless evolution, or are we masterpieces of a creator? It’s true that modern science provides some theories about our universe that don’t need to include the assumption of some supernatural interference. However, it is less known that for people who believe in God, many discoveries of modern science give arguments challenging modern materialism, which denies any supernatural existence.
     Many physicists use the term “fine-tuned” to describe our universe. There are many physical constants necessary to be plugged in physical formulae to make them consistent with the results of experiments. People have tried to change the value of a constant and then saw what the universe would be under the assumption, and they found the result disastrous. Normally, if a constant were changed even slightly, the universe would not support advanced life like ours currently does. For example, the magnitude of strong nuclear force is a constant shaping our universe. Increasing it by 2 percent would have prevented the formation of protons — yielding a universe without atoms. Decreasing it by 5 percent would have given us a universe without stars. There are more than thirty other constants having such fine-tuned property. Some of them couldn’t be changed more than one part of one billion billion billion. These are the coincidences that led to life on earth.
     There are more coincidences. Our earth is a perfect planet for life. The orbit of the earth is neither too close to nor too far away from the sun. If it were, it would be too hot or too cold. The size of the earth is also moderate. If it were too small, the gravity could not hold the atmosphere. If it were too big, the gravity would make it hard for humans and animals to walk or to jump. Our unusually large satellite, the moon, the unique plate tectonics, the perfect composition of the atmosphere, etc., are all conditions that are ideal for maintaining the biosphere. Without these coincidences, the earth could not be our lovely home.
     Life on earth itself is a mystery. According to modern theories, life came from random reactions of chemicals on the early earth. A series of coincidences produced the first single-cell life form. It evolved into millions of species including various plants and animals having trillions of cells. This story looks unbelievable, but modern science has to adopt it to fill in the blanks of the integrated system of scientific knowledge. This story looks more unbelievable when we know more about molecular biology. For example, a cell, even the simplest kind like a prokaryote, employs hundreds of different chemical reactions to maintain its functioning. A reaction may involve dozens of kinds of chemical molecules. Scientists in the early twenty-first century still don’t understand the roles of some molecules, notably proteins, in many chemical reactions. Can such a cell be merely a production of random processes?
     Next let’s talk about our wonderful body. The more we understand our body, the less possible it should be that this body came into existence naturally. One amazing property of our body is that it can repair itself when it is hurt. If a person has a cut, it will close in several days. If a bone is broken, it will combine again if the broken bone is set well. Nothing we have created is capable of doing this. Can a car or a house repair itself? When a person is hurt, he or she knows it because of the painful feeling, but the repairing work is done by local cells automatically. The will of that person has nothing to do with this procedure. Some cells will “know” that some of their neighbors are missing. They will “tell” others by chemical signals. At this point, blood will bring more nutrients and some cells will use cell division to create new cells to replace the missing ones. This is a complicated and marvelous process that we take for granted.
     The immune system of our body is fancier than anything likely to be conjured in our imagination. It can identify things that don’t belong to our body and consider them threats to our health. The immune system utilizes many different physical or chemical methods to eliminate invaders. It destroys billions of microbes to keep a person from dying from the first day to the last day of his or her life. However, we neither feel nor have to attend to our immune system most of the time. Every several months a person gets sick because he or she meets a new kind of microbes and his or her immune system can’t deal with it right away. Normally, after two to three days, the immune system creates a chemical weapon specializing in attacking these microbes, destroying them all. The person feels his or her symptoms disappear after that.
     The human brain is arguably the most complex object in the world. Every person has one in his or her skull. It has one trillion cells, including a hundred billion neurons, which form a network relating to the ability of thinking. It coordinates all systems in the body. It processes signals received from nerves of all parts of the body and provides its carrier feeling and sensation. It is capable of producing visual images of the three-dimensional world. It is capable of using language to communicate with others. It is capable of dealing with abstract ideas such as science or art. How a brain finishes its work is a total mystery. Although we often compare a brain to a computer, no computer can simulate a brain at this time. It’s crazy to say a computer is generated automatically. However, biologists assert that our brain is a result of hereditary variation and natural selection.
     How come there are so many coincidences? How rare is the chance that our wonderful body was formed without a designer behind the process? If you play the lottery and win millions for ten consecutive times, do you believe that you are just lucky, or are there reasons for that? Don’t these coincidences provide evidence that there is a God who designed and created everything in the universe?
     There is a reasonable opposing argument: the anthropic principle. Because we exist, we should observe there are many coincidences that led us to exist. If the universe were not exactly like it is, it might still exist, but we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it. If we were not an intelligent species perfectly capable of surviving, thinking, and working, we could not create an advanced civilization and use language to discuss anything. Although the chance to win the first prize of a lottery is less than one in a million, the person responsible for writing a check to a winner will meet a winner 100 percent of the time.
     The anthropic principle is logically impeccable, but it has its limitations. It only explains why there are so many lucky conditions for the existence of our intelligent species and advanced civilization. It can’t explain why our civilized world has some other lucky conditions. We will use some examples of our society to illustrate this point.
     The economic situation of our society is an example. There are all kinds of jobs in all areas of life. You, the reader, like some of them but don’t like others. Your personality makes you unfit for some positions. Everyone’s talent is limited. However, there are people doing all the other things in society to make your life easier. All different kinds of endowments are distributed to all people. Society needs a certain amount of people to do a job and there are a certain amount of people, partly because of their genes and partly because of their training, capable of doing it. Maybe there is a God assigning every person different gifts. He planned so carefully that most people can find their places in the economic chain. If things don’t work, we will have economic crises. Depression happens, though. However, this gives us a proof that it is a real miracle to maintain prosperity in most years. God gives us our daily bread by arranging the stable economic system of our society.
     To give another illustration of the balanced economic situation of our society, let’s visit a supermarket. All kinds of necessities are found there. Everything is produced by certain people. All things can be made from available raw materials via suitable manufacturing methods. The prices of goods and services are distributed according to the general needs of the market. People need food every day, and normally food costs are not exceptionally high. Cooking utensils are priced higher than food, but people can buy them once and use them for many years. An electric dishwasher is more expensive, but not every person has to buy one. These are a few examples of our stabilized market. This situation can be achieved only by accurately coordinating all kinds of scientific laws, all social conditions, and all realities of our nature.
     Next, let’s examine our political conditions. At this time, the world is divided into about two hundred countries, most of them at peace with each other. That is not necessary the norm. There was a time that the Roman Empire found that it was far stronger than its neighbors and it conquered almost all of them. There were other people who wanted to do the same thing but failed. A divided but peaceful international situation is good for people of all races all over the world. At present the United States of America is the strongest country in the world. The military power it possesses can destroy any other country at any time it wants. (It may have difficulty in actually occupying a country, however.) It is lucky for the world that the United States doesn’t fully release this military potential. Anyway, a relatively peaceful world as seen in recent years requires many conditions, including military ability, geographical situation, racial relationship, and international trade, fitting together. It is beyond the control of any one person.
     Another balanced feature of the world is the similarity of the lives of people in different Ages. Although technical conditions are totally different, the main story of the lives of people has been the same. Ancient people had to work. Modern people also have to work, and, strangely, many people have to work overtime despite the utilization of efficient machines and extensive energy. Ancient people raised children in their families. Modern people raise children in their families, too. Ancient people are all dead. Modern people also will die despite the impressive improvements of medicine. There were wars two thousand years ago. There were bigger wars fought with more terrible weapons after the Industrial Revolution. There was a young man questioning the authenticity of the mythology of his tribe and subsequently expelled by the elders during the Bronze Age. People still argue about the existence of God in the twenty-first century. The progress of knowledge didn’t change the fundamentals of our society. All generations all over the world are alike. This should be an interesting point about our civilization.
     The above characteristics of our society are also coincidences that should not be ignored. They are harder to quantify than those scientific coincidences discussed earlier, because they are closer to the real world, where the souls reside, and more distant from the technical and abstract showroom of science. They are closer to the lives of people, the reason for giving arguments about whether God exists or not. These arguments which don’t involve advanced scientific knowledge can’t be easily rejected by some pure logical reasoning, like the anthropic principle.
     We suggest that these things provide evidence for the existence of a God. There should be a God who carefully planned a universe. He fine-tuned the constants of the universe, so various chemical reactions would take place, complex organisms would emerge, and these organisms would evolve into some intelligent beings. Besides this, he also precisely arranged everything before the beginning of the universe to make sure that when some intelligent species creates a society, this society would have a certain degree of stability. God took care of almost everything to make an appropriate, ordered, and balanced world. Many possible terrible things were not allowed to exist before the universe was created. At the moment of the big bang, he was able to predict where each particle would go after billions of years and what kind of advanced civilization would be there because he is God.
     Otherwise, if there is no God and our world is just a result of mindless evolution, it could be chaotic and full of uncontrollable disasters. All kinds of conditions on earth and all dimensions of human capabilities are just right to make our world operate well. These are facts that atheists can’t explain. The possibility to reach this result without planning is too small.

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