it's all religion

“a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”

This is one of the definitions for the word “religion” from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Everyone has a religion. Everyone has a system of beliefs held with ardor (today’s buzz word, “passion”) and faith.

An atheist is no exception. Your belief system is one of two things. Either everything that appears to exist is simply an illusion, or everything that exists comes about by random, purposeless chance. These are systems of belief held by some with ardor and faith.

Illusion is just that. An illusion. There is no evidence to consider. With this kind of atheism, you just accept it as fact and then you are done with it.

Not so with atheism based on the idea that everything that exists comes about by chance. There is a way to follow the evidence. One way to test the theory that everything comes about in a random and purposeless fashion is to see if there is any inference of design in the universe. What is the weight of the evidence? Does it appear more likely that something happened randomly or more likely that something is designed? We can make that distinction.

We know about human design. The computer on my lap right at this very moment appears to have been designed by someone. It would be illogical for me to think that atoms in the universe just connected in a random way and produced this machine. But what if there were machines in the natural world that appear designed, too? What would be a reasonable conclusion?

Consider this.