Hope, Belief, and God's Existence

Here's a really good letter to the editor that I read in the Philadelphia Inquirer by a fellow I know fairly well, in response to an article by John Allen Paulos--another evangelical atheist trying to hook onto the Richard Dawkins gravy train:

Religion is founded in an observable fact that John Allen Paulos can't logically explain away - existence.

The most basic form of religion is not dogmatic but rational and doesn't involve God at all. We are faced with two possibilities of existence, that the universe stretches back endlessly in time or that it appeared out of nothing before time existed. These offer little problem to a mathematical model of reality, but to the human mind, these are not possibilities but impossibilities.

Once we see our very existence as impossible, supernatural, a kind of miracle, we have religion. And once we accept this one miracle, we concede the possibility of other miracles.

But why God? Because the unanswerable questions of when, where and how of our impossible existence lead naturally to why and then who. In their zeal to reject God, most atheists also reject any possibility of the supernatural. The universe refutes them.

Short. Concise. To the point. Hits the nail on the head.