Preliminary remarks.
Before I start, let me acknowledge that I have friends and relatives who are professed atheists. In my reading and conversations I have come across both atheists and believers-in-a-divinity who are very derisive of those who hold the opposite opinion to theirs. I wish to distance myself from these behaviours and attitudes.
Secondly, I am not going to provide footnotes and citations. You can do your own reading to backup or disprove any position of mine. I would be sincerely interested if you can point out for me where I make any errors of fact or logic.
Foundation
My position is based on the following, upon which both atheists and I seem to agree:
1. The natural universe as we know it had a beginning. Scientists have calculated its age as between 13 and 14 billion years.
2. Before this there was nothing, not even space. Even saying "before this" is a contradiction in terms because there was no time either. "Before" is a time-related concept. Both space and time began with the beginning of the universe.
My position on creation
Atheistic sceptics hold the position that we should not accept anything that cannot be demonstrated empirically or logically concluded. At least, I gather that this is their position - I am open to correction here. In contrast, my position is that we should not accept anything that contradicts logic or empirical evidence.
When I was in high school our chemistry teacher taught us about spontaneous combustion. I totally get it that when you have the perfect storm of prerequisite conditions you can get a reaction. I simply don't get it that something, even or especially a "singularity", can bring itself into existence before it, or anything else, exists. To me, that so flies in the face of reason and logic that it requires a huge act of faith far greater than any faith I have ever been called upon to profess as a Christian.
This brings me to the conclusion that the atheist position is founded upon faith. Atheists "believe" that there is no creator outside of the empirically demonstrable natural order. There is no "proof" for this position which I consider illogical, and having no logic that I have found to defend it. As I understand it, the closest thing to a proof is that there is no proof for the contrary - the so-called sceptical position.
So deists, theists and I conclude by logic that there must have been some Being, before time and space began, which brought time, space and the natural order of our universe into existence.
The role of this "Being" fills the minimum definition for "God" - the Creator.
Why did "God" do this?
Deists claim to be agnostic on this point. They say we cannot know anything about God the Creator or Architect other than what we can conclude by observing the world around us. Deists actively take a position against organised religion that relies on or accepts any form of "revelation". They see God as not intervening in any way in the natural order of the universe. God can thus be compared to some amazing watch maker who created and assembled all these parts, started it ticking and has now left it to itself to wind down in due course while He-She-It goes off and does something else.
This seems to me to be a little like the atheist position on creation: we cannot prove God's existence empirically therefore God does not exist. By contrast, I would posit that there is place for reasoning to a likely or probable conclusion. Before doing that let's make some observations which could be used as premises.
1. Some of what makes up the universe is inanimate such as metals; other elements are living, like plants, microbes and animals.
2. Some of the animals have reflective self-awareness as individual persons, can communicate complex concepts and can reason logically. Humans are one such example. Theoretically there could be others.
3. Many of these human, reasoning animals have come to similar conclusions about the existence of a Creator-God from their own powers of reasoning.
4. This ability must have been put into the "DNA" (analogically speaking) of the original singularity or "cell" of creation. The alternative is that the Creator-God did not put this into the original design and we got to this ability by accident, which I find most unlikely.
This last point leads me to conclude that the Creator-God wanted reasoning animals such as humans to be able to deduce that He-She-It exists and was responsible for their existence. Again, the alternatives are either that the Creator-God did not want us to deduce this but that we did so anyway, which I find absurd, or that He-She-It never thought about that and we got to this position by accident, which, again, I find unlikely.
So, why did God do this? At least one of the reasons must surely be...
so that we could know Him-Her-It.
More in due course...
