[driftless2]

I'm not religious, I don't know what happens after you die. Afterlife? I sure don't know.

But atheists have to explain to me how matter came into existence. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was told the first law of thermodynamics is matter is neither created nor destroyed.

Then if matter is not created, how did it come into existence? The answer would point to something supernatural. And that is one answer egoist atheists can't stand to consider.

[FredZarguna]

Something to understand: Thermodynamics is a descriptive branch of physics and not a theoretical one. That is, it is purely observational. The First Law of Thermodynamics -- which you correctly identify to be a restatement of the Law of Conservation of Energy -- is an observation and nothing more. We have never observed energy being created, nor destroyed. So we accept as axiomatic that this is true.

All four laws of Thermodynamics are of this kind. But the deeper explanations of why they are true [except for the 0^th Law] come from other theoretical parts of physics and not Thermodynamics itself.

[dhs12345]

Matter is only transformed.

You might know about the probably calculation: how many years would it take for 12 monkeys randomly typing on a keyboard to type Hamlet from beginning to end. I think that it was 10^14 years. Longer than the existence of the universe.

The point is that for nature to be completely random, we wouldn't exist. Actually, nothing would exist. The chemistry of the RNA and DNA process wouldn't exist, the formation of an organism through random evolution, etc. etc.