I question whether there is no evidence of a deity or not. The reason I question this is because I have great trouble reconciling the existence of life in the universe. I don't know where it comes from or why it exists. I do not know why collections of self-perpetuating, reproducing, elements powered indirectly by radiation, spend energy on making movies, harvesting pearls, or write poetry. Compared to how everything else works in the universe, life performs the most complex tasks for the most complex reasons which do not seem to have empirical cause and effect. Absolutely nothing in the universe behaves remotely like life. We have even separated the study of life from physics, geology, and chemistry because it bears so little relation to those sciences. With no deity, biology must simply be a branch of chemistry yet chemistry has no answer for why Star Wars is a better movie than Overdrawn At The Memory Bank or what makes The Buddy Holly Song a catchy tune or to what purpose these were created and disseminated.
Science may eventually be able to come to explain these things but right now we're no better than Ogg hearing thunder and deciding it's Thor striking down demons with Mjöllnir. Out of all the order of the universe, life is distinctively disordered, illogical, irrational, with no apparent cause and no apparent effect.
It seems to me that you are running together at least two different questions. One question is, how does life come into existence in the universe? Or (if you want to be more specific) how did it do so on earth? That is a scientific question. At this point, nobody has any compelling answer to it. Fifty-some years ago, some scientists got as far as synthesizing amino acids from water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. That was a start. But, so far as I know, nobody has any idea, beyond vague speculation, of how you can get from that to the formation of proteins and nucleic acids. Still, I see no reason to believe that that problem will not eventually be solved. I think that you mean to acknowledge this when you say that "science may eventually be able to explain these things."
But there is another question that I think you are raising, or trying to raise. That question is: why does life come into existence in the universe (or, again, to be more specific, why did it do so on earth)? I do not think that this is a scientific question. But I also doubt whether it is fully intelligible. If you start out with the assumption that the coming-into-being of life is an inherently improbable event, then, relative to that assumption, it may be reasonable to ask "why?" even after you have an account of the "how." That is, even when you have an account of the process by which inorganic matter gives rise to living things, the whole process may have a Rube-Goldberg aspect to it. But the assumption that the genesis of life is an inherently improbable event is at best unwarranted, for two reasons.
First, until we actually have a confirmed and determinate account of the process by which life arises, we have no basis for saying anything about the probability of that process occurring. For us to say, in our present ignorance, that the genesis of life out of the inorganic is "improbable" would be, to use your simile, exactly like Ogg attributing thunder to the acts of Thor. (Note that this is not, however, what you were applying the simile to.)
Second, even if it were to come out that the process by which life emerges is "improbable," in the sense that you could set up the same conditions on a million planets and still not get any life coming into existence on any of them, that would still not mean that its existence on earth required some further explanation. Even though we don't know what proportion of the stars in the universe may have earth-like planets orbiting them, given that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and approximately the same number of galaxies in the universe, that makes a lot of laboratories for the genesis of life. Even if only one in a million planets
[correction: I meant one planet among a million stars] has the right conditions for life to arise, and the process only occurs in one in a million of those planets, the number of planets on which life arises would be on the order of ten billion (if I've done my math correctly).
Let me wind things up this way: I think it is entirely reasonable -- at least, not unreasonable -- to wonder at the existence of life in the universe. I think that there is indeed something incomprehensible about that fact; but not in the sense that we lack knowledge of its causes (though we do). The existence of life is incomprehensible to us in the sense that, even if we knew everything that there was to be known about how life comes into existence, we would still have difficulty wrapping our minds around the fact that something that is all-or-nothing for us is a mere contingent happenstance in the universe. If somebody finds the word "God" to be the most concise and satisfying expression of his sense of wonder at this fact (and other, equally disturbing facts, such as the contingency of one's own particular existence, the fact that one came into being out of nothing, and the fact that one will eventually cease to exist), I see no objection to such a way of expressing oneself. But when people take God to be some sort of
cause that
explains what science supposedly "fails" to explain, I think that they are just confusing themselves.
