The order of the universe does not point to a lawgiver. Unless you view atoms & energy quanta as having minds of their own, and have chosen to obey God instead of going off on their own private adventures.Atheism (logical conclusion of evolution) must hold that transcendentals (incl. the universe's physical existence) stand on their own - without meaning, without purpose. Sure, he uses them, but he cannot give an account for them. They become, themselves, the great "I AM" - presupposed but unaccounted for. They just are.
choice becomes one of probability: the logical conclusion that we live in an ordered universe whose laws point to a lawgiver, or we live in a random universe in which said laws "just happen" to exist.
But there is no reason why consistency should not be exactly the expected result of a natural world. In fact there is every reason to think that a consistent universe consisting of unthinking parts would be precisely that - consistent. Because the fundamental particles can't "choose" to act in any other way.
Your basic assumption of how a mindless universe should act is totally wrongheaded.
(I'm off to bed too. :-)
That's irrational, and points out how atheism is religious in nature.
I will go out on a limb and assume that you, like me, are a fairly intelligent person in a technical field. You might be familiar with tri-state electronics. Atheism is not the high-Z state. It is the zero state, and theism is the one state (reverse them if you like).
To use another example, atheism is the absence of a check in your browser's "settings" checkbox. It is not the checkbox grayed-out - that is the fallacy of pretended neutrality. No one approaches the subject from a neutral perspective.
Atheism is the logical conclusion of Darwinism.
One will build his life around that belief i.e. it is a religion or worldview.
One MUST therefore grasp and defend the basis of those perceived realities. To do otherwise, as yours and others' persistence illustrates, implies a radical moral re-evaluation of all of one's prior thoughts and actions in life. That is why, in my opinion, these threads become so heated (I do hope I have not contributed to that...)
To answer your point about science making presuppositions: I agree! That's the point. And those presuppositions make most sense in an ordered universe. And the premises themselves are not subject to scientific inquiry - you can't put an idea under a microscope. You can merely test a hypotheses, asking "what if..." and making a judgment based on the outcome. The very principles by which the universe is ordered (or orders itself, if you prefer) themselves point to an overarching intelligence that governs all. To deny that is to ask someone to believe in the irrational.