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Having been an atheist for a large part of my life, it always amazed me how wonderful nature is: the power and strength of the natural world contrasted with delicate life and newborn babies is something which seems to be miraculous.

But of course there's no God, I used to think to myself. It just doesn't make any sense. So how, as a Christian, do I now reconcile my views?

The Creation Story and the Big Bang theory don't necessarily have to conflict with each other. In the 13th century, St Thomas Aquinas stated, following on from Aristotle's idea of everything having the potential to change its nature, that the creation of the world needed something to start it off. Okay, we could argue that it's the Big Bang, but Aristotle talked of the unmoved mover,' something which must be constant and unchanging which started that explosion. And his explanation was God.

If you think of how well everything in the world works together, from the pattern of the seasons to the working of the human eye, it suggests that they didn't just happen by chance. The Teleological Argument says that the world has been designed with a purpose and Richard Swinburne has more recently built on the 18th century argument of William Paley that the evidence points towards a creator rather than an accident.

The Anthropic Principle indicates that details like the position of the Earth in relation to the sun or the depth of the ozone layer are exactly right for the survival of life on the Earth. If we examine some of this fine-tuning of the world that surrounds us and the physical laws which explain them, Swinburne argues that probability shows us that a creator God is more likely than an accidental Big Bang. And it's precisely this weighing up of probabilities which science itself works on.

I'm not saying that the world works perfectly or humans are even the perfect creation freewill has seen to that but I firmly believe that there are too many coincidences for a cosmic accident to have occurred.

But the ideas of science took over from religion because people wanted more proof, or evidence, of the creation of the universe. Scientists tell us that a huge explosion caused the universe to begin and this expanding matter grew into what we know today. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection appears to be supported by the discovery of fossils and the structure of the human brain, which contains the most basic fight or flight' mechanisms at its centre and the more complex reasoning and creative

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