For anyone who doesn’t know what a standard sudoku puzzle looks like, you can find one in every issue of this newspaper. The total possible number of solutions for this type of puzzle structure, which has 81 spaces each of which must be filled with a number from one to nine, has been calculated to be approximately 6.671 sextillion.

According to the United Nations, the population of the earth is estimated to be 7.7 billion as of April 2019. If the world population were only 6.7 billion (one billion less than the actual population) there would be about one trillion times as many possible solutions to sudoku puzzles as there are people in the world.

You might well be wondering what the point of all this is given the fact that sextillions are totally incomprehensible to any ordinary person. The point is that, while the sudoku puzzle is capable of amazing variety, each person, composed of roughly 37.2 trillion cells which can be arranged in far more ways than a sudoku puzzle, is complex beyond our imagination. Add to this the generally accepted idea that humans are more than cells. At the very least our bodies could not function without amazingly complex bioelectric impulses working together in remarkable ways.

At this point the question of what life is and what causes it arises. My deeply held conviction is that the most reasonable answer to such ultimate questions is found in the Bible.

Life is almost infinitely complex. Those who confidently assert, with absolutely no actual proof, that the universe and life itself came about through chance are taking a far greater leap of faith than I am. The God of the Bible is the super-intelligence behind life. Read the Bible (His book) and get to know him.

Pastor Dan York can be reached at Dover Community Church.