But I also knew that idea did not make sense. After all, I don’t look at billboards — which contain much simpler information than DNA — and think that wind and erosion created them. That wouldn’t be rational. Suddenly, I found that I was a very discomfited atheist.
This was essentially the same intellectual path that I followed on my way back. The idea that DNA was created by the random action of weather and radiation upon dirty water just seems ludicrous to me. If that's what the data suggest, then we're obviously interpreting the data incorrectly.
I mean, imagine if a team of astronauts found a functioning digital calculator buried in a million-year-old stratum of the surface of Mars. Would they conclude the calculator was designed by some intelligent creature, or that the calculator was created accidentally by the effect of billions of years of weathering upon Martian stone? Would they try to find more finished artifacts, or would they start looking for fossil electronic devices demonstrating a gradual progression of calculator ancestors beginning with the first primitive transistors created by chance from the non-living minerals of Mars?
Of course not. The calculator in all its complexity and purposeful design would be seen rightly as incontestable evidence of the presence of intelligent life on Mars.
And yet a single biological cell is fantastically complex -- much more complex than any calculator...
Just like the billboard description in the article above, there's a huge difference between a macroscopic object and a microscopic one. For starters, the latter is affected by far more number of fundamental forces, than the latter.
When you take two baseball-sized objects, the forces beween them would be negligible. When you take two atoms, you will have to take into account electic, perfect-elastic, nuclear, etc. forces between them. The entire game-plan changes in the microscopic world.
To that, add the billions of years, trillions of interactions each day of each year, additive, gradual processes, polymers like proteins that fold, and allow additions to their branches, etc., the entire situation differs from a "wind eroding a rock into a calculator" scenario.
Just because one can't comprehend these processes and to give up and declare that a god entity, or several such entities must have been involved in the design, gives a hint that the person might really have not been an atheist, in the first place.
Only deep, personal, divine intervention can ever convert a real atheist.