Pondering the universe, nature, and life leads to the question of causation. Most consider it to be too ponderous and unanswerable, or commit it to experts in science, philosophy, or religion.
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Since nobody was there to observe the beginning of it all, disagreements abound. But there is actually a very simple way to solve the puzzle. It requires nothing more than opening our minds and considering the truths we experience hour by hour in our lives.
 
Follow along with me in this brief solution to the question, a question millions of pages have been written about, and see if you don't agree.
 
The options boil down to two choices, spontaneity or intelligence. They are opposite to one another.
 
To determine which is true requires that we define and measure them against reason, evidence, and natural law.
 
Spontaneous things are those which exist in their natural state, bound by natural law, and unaltered by intelligent intervention. In nature there are atoms, molecules, gases, liquids, rocks, and so forth. They either stay as they are, degrade, or move about under the forces of nature. Rocks can turn to dust, oceans can make waves, sand can make dunes. 
 
Such changes are within the nature of natural things. However, natural things don't upgrade into something other than what natural laws dictate. Rocks don't become buildings, sand doesn't turn into panes of glass, and water doesn't become plumbing systems with some help from copper and petroleum for piping.
 
Such alterations are possible, of course. But only with the intervention of outside intelligent agency. Intelligence is thus best defined as a creative force that can take things beyond their natural state and into a more complex functional one.
 
We see this difference between spontaneity and intelligence in our everyday lives. We can tell which things are spontaneously and naturally caused, and which are intelligently caused. Forensic science differentiates spontaneous from artificial to solve crimes. A ripple on the ground made by water or wind is different than a tire track from a getaway car. Archeologists differentiate a stone spontaneously broken off from a fallen rock from a stone intelligently chipped into an arrow head. Astronomers differentiate spontaneous planetary features made by natural geologic activity, from patterns such as parallel lines and other perfect geometric shapes which can only be made by intelligence.
 
So let's use the same criteria—natural spontaneous state versus intelligently altered— to look at our world and the universe and determine causation.
 
Clearly, the order, complexity, and functionality of everything from atoms to human brains lies outside the capabilities of random spontaneous processes and natural laws. While the evolutionary hypothesis claims otherwise, there is absolutely no proof that nothing can spontaneously create natural laws, energy, quanta and atoms, and that these in turn can coalesce spontaneously into our world and its myriad life forms.
 
A single cell in our body contains trillions of perfectly codependent parts all moving about in machine fashion at lightning speed. Atoms are miniature machines. The universe is a gigantic machine with perfectly interlocking co-dependent parts. Machines do not arise spontaneously, they require creative intelligence. There is no exception to this rule.
 
When you consider that a crudely chipped stone is proof of intelligent intervention, there could be no more glaring proof of intelligent intervention than life and every other machine-like aspect of the natural world. (See this video for an astonishing example: youtu.be/4KmMzpQdwwk)
This conclusion fits the three criteria for determining truth.
 
A. Reason:
1. Complex functional machine-like things that do not spontaneously arise within the scope of the natural state of their components, can result only from intelligent intervention.
2. The universe and life are complex functional machine-like things.
3. Therefore, the universe and life are the result of intelligent intervention.
 
B. Evidence:
All complex, functional, machine-like things are observed to not arise spontaneously, but only through intelligent intervention.
 
C. Natural Laws:
1.  The Law of Biogenesis
Life cannot arise spontaneously from nonlife—it has never been observed, nor can humans even make it happen.
 
2  The Laws of Probability
Highly improbable events—beyond the probability bound of one in 10150— do not occur. The odds of even one enzyme critical for life is far beyond the probability bound, and the odds of life occurring spontaneously (Sagan) are in excess of one in 102000000000.
 
3. The Law of Information
Information can only degrade from random spontaneous activity and can only arise from intelligent input. The universe and life is suffused with prodigious information, and therefore requires an intelligent source.
 
4.  The Laws of Thermodynamics
a. Within our reality, energy/matter can neither be created not destroyed. Yet it exists. This demands an intelligent creator outside of our reality.
b. Order naturally degrades to disorder (entropy increase). The only way to countermand that is to insert intelligent creative action.
 
5. The Law of Organism Fixity
Creatures stay essentially as they are (syngameons). DNA does not add functional improvements through spontaneous mutations— such changes violate #'s 3-5 above— and thus always degrade an organism. Epigenetics can modify expression of DNA potential, such as seen in organism variety, but not improve upon its complexity like, say, changing hair into feathers. Varied and environmentally selected organisms always revert to a common wild type. If allowed to interbreed, they do not ascend into more complex creatures. Such fixity speaks to intelligent design, not a hodgepodge of genetics brewing every conceivable organism through chance spontaneity.
 
6. The Laws of Chemistry
Life cannot arise spontaneously because the mass action of water drives condensation reactions (common in biochemistry) to the simpler starting materials, not to more complex end products.
Further, life's chemicals are of an exclusive three-dimensional shape (stereoisomers) that cannot be produced by spontaneous chemistry. (Which only produces nonfunctional racemic mixtures.)

Moreover, evolutionists/materialists/spontaneists cannot provide any of the niggling biochemical details of life from nonlife, the appearance of an organ, or ascendency from a protobiont (a hypothetical first living cell) to human.

All such chemical design, complexity, interdependency, and selectivity points to intelligent causation, not spontaneity.
 
The conclusion forced by reason, evidence, and natural law is that our reality was created by an intelligence.
 
Please note that this proof does not require the interjection of any man-made religion, not does it lead to one.