Is the universe and our world a great cosmic accident, or the product of God's creation?
Let's look at this from two perspectives, the Bible and science.
First, the scripture is crystal clear that neither we, nor our world are the product of random chance. The opening sentence of the Bible makes this point:
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).
In the next verses we see that "God" is not an impersonal force. He is a being with not only great power, but intelligence, emotion, and a will.
When God made "light" He also evaluated this creation and judged it "good,"
"And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good..." (Genesis 1:3)
This same pattern is repeated for all six days of Creation. A force does not make judgements and is not pleased or displeased!
On the sixth day of Creation God made His highest creation, mankind.
"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them....God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." (Genesis 1:27, 31).
God did not make a mistake! When He finished creating everything, including mankind, He up's His evaluation to "very good."
Only mankind is created in God's image. No plant, rock or animal or even angels can claim this fact! There is something about you and me that is radically different from all other things God made.
False religions created their gods in the image of man, but the Bible says the opposite, that God made us in His image!
Genesis 2 zooms in on the details of the creation of man. And chapter 3 details how man rebelled and turned God's created order upside down, putting Satan at the top, followed by man, and God last.
By the way, our gender, male and female, is part of God's "very good" unchanging creative order.
Jesus affirmed literal creation in Matthew 19:4-6 when teaching on marriage, and defining it as between a "man" and a "woman" for life by referring to Genesis 1 and 2:
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
When a biblical truth appeals to something that doesn't change, such as the Creation, it is a timeless, universal truth, not something that was a passing part of culture. Jesus affirmed literal creation!
But what about science and creation?
Did we evolve and the Bible is simply incorrect? Or is the Genesis story true as it appears at face value, and we are God's direct, purposeful creation?
Much hangs on this one point! If we are an accident, then all this talk about God doesn't really matter (Maybe we should just watch some cat videos on YouTube to feel better). But if the Genesis account is true, then all else in Scripture is of utmost importance!
Here are some problems with random chance being the cause of life and our world:
DNA is information, much like computer code or the words in a sentence. And while chance can create patterns such as snowflakes it never creates information. For example, if you walked on the beach and saw in the sand (or the rocks) the very simple sentence,
"John loves Mary,"
you would know intuitively that even with many billions of years of wave and wind action that sentence would never be produced by chance. DNA has billions of bits of information! And it's the instructions for building a self-replicating factory (the cells of your body and your body overall) of staggering complexity. We have never observed DNA pop into existence either directly or in fossile form. And computer models using random chance don't produce it either.
But let's say somehow a strand of DNA was created by random chance. It would not have the protective membrane of a cell wall or all the other cellular components that support it doing it's job. They would all have to have been "evolved" at the same time.
How long would random chance take?
Amoeba crossing the known universe. Let's take just one building block of a cell, a protein. How long would random chance take to make just one protein? Longer than an amoeba "racing" from one end of the known universe to the other, and back. Check out this video.
Probability does not support random chance as the creator of life.
For a full discussion we direct you to books such as The Case for Faith and The Case for Christ among many others. Lee Strobels the author was a skeptic and atheist as well as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune. But through investigaing personally the "case" for the claims of the Bible he became convinced it is true!