Last week, my dryer quit working. The control panel lit up, but nothing happened when I pushed “start.”

“Oh, dear,” I told my family. “Maybe it will magically fix itself.”

That’s always my hope when something goes wrong around the house. Maybe if we ignore it, it’ll straighten itself out. Sometimes this works! But anybody who owns a house, rents an apartment, or drives a car knows that’s a long shot. Almost always, you need to do something to fix it.

Before Bernard Howard became a Christian, he was even more optimistic than I was, assuming not only that the universe could fix itself but that it also created itself. Accidentally. Magically. By chance.

“It was an explanation accepted by pretty much everyone around me in secular Britain, and I never even questioned it,” he wrote. “That explanation—I now see—is staggeringly implausible. It can be rebutted with empirical evidence, logic, and philosophy. But another way to push back against it is through poetry.”

Bernard’s poetry is delightful. It’ll make you laugh a little at the absurdity of secular logic—and laugh a little more with delight in a God who created our world to perfectly suit humanity.

Praise be to Chance—which, when looked at clearly, points all praise to God.