5 Things Few (If Any) Atheists Believe

4. That life arose and evolved by chance

Anyone who believes everything around us happened by chance — or who believes there’s a conscious designer behind the curtain — hasn’t caught up with the best of human knowledge.

The evidence points overwhelming to a third option — evolution by natural selection. The word “selection” gives away the fact that a non-random process is going on, one that naturally favors certain variations over others. Life is thought to have arisen through a process called abiogenesis, through which simple inorganic materials, responding to a few physical principles, combined to create the basic building blocks of single-celled organisms. Add a couple billion years of natural selection, stirring constantly, let cool, and you get the variation we see around us.

So atheists think life is pretty amazing and complex, but they don’t think it happened by design or by chance.