Like many of you, I grew up in the early years of the space race. I remember as a boy sometimes standing in my backyard at night looking up with a flashlight, flicking it on and off, sending my own secret code out into the faraway stars. I was sure that somewhere up there some intelligent being would notice my little flashlight beam and recognize it as a friendly greeting from planet earth.

I assumed there must be millions of inhabited earthlike planets scattered through the heavens. After all, the movies and TV programs of the time routinely showed beings from outer space visiting our planet or our spacemen meeting other life-forms as they explored the galaxy.

For decades now, most scientists have assumed that uncountable planets inhabited by uncountable life-forms are scattered across the universe, just waiting for us to make contact with them or vice versa. Yet after we've spent years of effort and billions of dollars on projects like the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) listening for signals indicating intelligent life, all we have detected is—nothing. Not a single sound anywhere indicating intelligent life out there. Nothing.

Could we really be all alone in the universe? In recent years several intriguing and important books have asked that question, among them such works as The Creator and the Cosmos, Rare Earth, Nature's Destiny and The Privileged Planet. They're fascinating reading. Written by authors from across the ideological spectrum, they essentially reach the same startling conclusion: We shouldn't be here.

Mathematically, it's simply impossible. When we consider the hundreds of factors required to produce life or a planet capable of sustaining life as we know it—factors as diverse as the decay rates of elements and the distance of a planet's orbit to its sun—and multiply them by the scientific and mathematical odds of those factors being right, it just doesn't work. We shouldn't be here.

For example, the honored British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle calculated that the odds of only one factor necessary for life coming together by chance—the enzymes needed to perform the chemical functions needed to produce the most simple living creature—were one in 10 40,000. That's mathematical shorthand for 10 followed by 40,000 zeros, enough to fill roughly seven pages of this issue. For perspective, mathematicians consider any probability of less than one in 10 50 to be impossible.

We shouldn't be here. Yet here we are. And not only are we here, note the authors of The Privileged Planet (one of whom is interviewed in this issue), we are perfectly positioned for scientific discovery of the universe around us.

This sheds a whole new light on Romans 1:20: "From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God" (New Living Translation).

Do you want to know whether God exists? Go outside and look up into the night sky, He says. None of that came together by itself, out of nothing. Look around you at the beautiful planet that sustains us, He says. It also didn't come together by chance, out of nothing.

The evidence is mounting that there is only one valid scientific explanation for our existence—and the One who made us designed it all so that we would "have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God."