All of the wonders around you are accidental. No almighty hand made a thousand billion stars. They made themselves. No power keeps them on their steady courses. The earth gravitized itself to keep the oceans from falling off toward the sun. Infants teach themselves to cry when they are hungry or hurt. A small flower invented itself so that we could extract digitalis for sick hearts.

The top few inches of our land just happens to have topsoil, without which we would have no vegetables to eat, no grass for the animals whose meat is our food. No one put oil just deep enough in the earth to keep until we need it. The wind which carries the delicate seedling to a fertile place was devised by us. The inexhaustible envelope of air — only 50 miles deep — and of exactly the right density to support human life, is just another law of physics.

But who invented physics? Who made the bank deposits of coal and zinc and iron and uranium inside the earth? Nobody. It was all just another priceless accident. Who showed a voice how to fly through the air on a radio wave? How does a picture leave an antenna, move through air in hundreds of dots, and come into millions of homes in precisely the right order to reproduce the picture?

Why does the earth spin at a given speed without ever slowing up, so that we have day and night? Who tilts it so that we get seasons? Without the magnetic north pole man would be unable to navigate the trackless oceans of water and air, but it just grew there ...

How about the sugar thermostat below the human pancreas? It maintains a level of sugar in the human blood sufficient for energy, but, without it, all of us would fall into a coma and die. No one created it. The sun stokes a fire just warm enough to sustain us on earth, but not hot enough to fry us, or cold enough to kill us. Who keeps the fire constant? No one! .. .

Where did the seeds come from for the first tree so that we would have shelter? Did someone devise fire to keep us warm? For countless centuries in countless places the forests and the vegetation perpetuated themselves without man's help. Why did they not die of blight and flame and neglect? What a lucky accident!

Clouds bring rain and shade. Who taught them how to vaporize, and pick up fresh water and carry it to places which need it? Is snow just a winter decoration? Or does it sit on mountain tops waiting for the warm spring sun to turn it into rains needed for the streams and farms below? A very lovely accident. And why does it melt at just the right time for the young crops to drink?

A salmon will swim upstream to have its babies and die and it will jump up fish ladders to do it. How does a salmon know that we need more salmon? Why does a pregnant eel at Hawaii swim all the way to Bermuda to give birth to little eels?

Illnesses have specific symptoms. Why this warning? Why not many illnesses with identical symptoms? Or no symptoms? Who showed a womb how to take the love of two persons, and keep splitting a tiny ovum until, in time, a baby would have the proper number of fingers, eyes, ears, and hair in the right places and come into the world when it is strong enough to sustain life? Who?

It's all accidental. There is no God! ...

This reminds of the evening a minister went for a walk down the beach with an acquaintance, a rather well- known atheist. They came across an intricate series of sand castles. "I wonder who made these?" said the atheist. The Christian's masterful reply silenced the atheist's godless talk: "My dear man, no one made them; they simply happened."

We all believe in our hearts
and confess with our mouths
that there is a single
and simple
spiritual being,
whom we call God.

"Mommy, who made me?"
"God made you, darling."
"Well, Mommy, who made the sky and the trees?"
"God made the sky and the trees. God made everything."
"Mommy, who made God?"

One mother who was approached about this dropped what she was doing and sat down with her youngster for a little talk. Pointing to her wedding band, she said, "This is a 'love ring,' which your daddy gave to me when we were married. Look at it closely and tell me where it begins and where it ends."

The youngster examined it carefully and then said, "There's no starting place and stopping place to a ring." The mother replied, "That's the way it is with God. He had no beginning and has no end, yet He encircles our lives with His presence. He is too wonderful, too great, for our minds to understand. Nobody ever made God--He always was!"

Somehow the boy realized that for God to be God, He could not have been created. He had to be without beginning and without end. He had to be self-existent. He had to be eternal.

(Revelation 1:8) "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty."

(Revelation 1:17b-18) "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. (18) I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.

At a White House breakfast for religious leaders, President Bush told the story of a little boy who offered up this simple prayer: "God bless Mom and Dad, my brother and sister; and, God do take care of Yourself because if anything happens to You, we're all sunk."