A common thread of argument for the existence of god involves the universe being so complex and ordered that it must have been designed by an intelligent agent. This argument puzzles me; our perspective is perhaps skewed because we live in a thin band, only two kilometers thick, of extraordinary complexity on the surface of our little planet.
The universe is not generally ordered or complex, which is exactly what we’d expect if there were no god. The universe consists of a vacuum littered with star dust and cosmic background radiation. Gliding haphazardly through this void are clumps of space dust. Some of those clumps grew large enough to ignite nuclear fusion at the center. Others grew so massive that they collapsed under their own weight. All of these phenomenon are immensely disordered and extremely hostile to life.
The only known exception is our little band on the surface of this little speck in the vast universe. While that does make our planet unique and extremely important to us, its existence is not outside the realm of probability in a universe as large as ours.
