THE NATURALIST WORLDVIEW: Can anyone offer proof of the driving force that started everything in motion?

I've been a huge fan of science since grade school, and have read science books all my life. A few things that keeps jumping out off all this scholarly literature is the fact that cosmologists cannot predict what caused the Big Bang...it's a singularity that isn't knowable in scientific terms. The scientific laws that we use to study our physical world simply break down as we back up in time, and are useless at predicting anything about the cause, or what existed, prior to the Big Bang event that brought our Universe into existence.

I also have read a ton of books on biology and evolution, such as Christian De Duve's "Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative" and Simon Conway Morris's "Life's Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe." Morris's book was wonderful, by the way, and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in the appearance of life on this planet. But the one thing I noticed in both these books is that they openly deal with the problems of the origin of life and speciation. Both authors admit to the apparently overwhelming odds against life arising by chance, but tell us that there's no reason to believe it arose by anything other than natural causes. In the end, I simply see circular reasoning at work. They're agnostics, and because they only believe in natural origins, then no matter how difficult the problems appear, there simply must be a "natural" solution. Case closed.

I question why I should accept naturalism purely on the say-so of scientists who admit they don't know what started the Universe, or what gave rise to the very deterministic laws that govern it, or how life arose, or can show through scientific study how new species arise. After 35 years of reading books on the subject, I have yet to read anything other than suggestions about how these things may have happened.

For full disclosure, I am a Christian who believes in a 14 billion year old Universe, common descent by biological processes, and speciation through biological processes (in other words, I believe in some form of common descent, but not purely naturalistic neo-Darwinian processes, which are problematic when explaining speciation). I think the evidence for this old-Earth worldview is overwhelming, and I don't see current scientific discovery as incompatible with my faith, or incompatible with a fair reading of Genesis that allows for interpretation and doesn't demand strict literalism.

When I read about the kabbalist Nahmanides and his description of the birth of the cosmos from a speck the size of a mustard seed, and its subsequent expansion, it's pretty startling because he wrote it about a thousand years ago and had not an inkling about modern cosmology. The intellectuals of the day all insisted the Cosmos was eternal, although the Torah claimed otherwise. A thousand years later, science develops the Big Bang model for the creation of the Universe, and it matches the Judeo-Christian model that Nahmanides used as his starting point.

Over an over again, we see highly-ordered and finely-tuned laws that are balanced on a razor's edge. How did these laws come to be? What determined the initial conditions of the Universe, and why did it arrive in such an ordered "package?" Instead of randomness, why do we see non-random, convergent evolution, which, by the rules of neo-Darwinian theory, shouldn't be happening? No matter who I read, I can't help but come to the conclusion that the deck was stacked.

Even the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, an athiest, noted that the Universe appeared to be a "set-up job," as he called it, and said "A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

So here's my question: If you can't prove naturalism is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, how can scientists insist that it's a purely natural Universe? If the Universe is created, then by default all the processes have some form of intent and purpose behind them. Understanding every little step may be possible, but how does that disprove God? After years of reading, that's the one single point that comes through all this scientific literature...scientists don't have proof of origins, but we should all accept the consensus view that it's natural anyway.

I'd be curious to see if anyone can offer solid scientific proof of naturalism, when all I see is a created Universe with intent and purpose behind it. I should point out that I'm not looking to change that worldview, but simply hoping to get a fair and intellectually-honest response from anyone holding a naturalist worldview. To some extent, it was the lack of answers in naturalism that helped me to embrace my faith-based worldview, and I'm curious to read why people choose naturalism when I think the evidence points the other way, and quite convincingly so.

In closing, I'll leave you with this wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis: "If naturalism were true, then all thoughts whatsoever would be wholly the result of irrational causes...it cuts its own throat."