Almost nothing in theoretical physics is a known fact. This kind of cosmic search for explanations is a great overreach of reason, math, and story-telling. There's some data such as the background radiation and the quantum phenomena that make some models more probable than others.
As I said elsewhere, proof has no business in our understanding of nature. Proof is for games with stipulated rules. Science is for wrapping our human minds around an inhuman reality. You'll say that that's begging the question in atheism's favour, but it's rather the result of objectivity.
It's not easy to be objective. True objectivity is utterly depersonalizing and humiliating. You leave behind your presuppositions and biases and you let the observations speak for themselves. That's the root of science, and what science discovered is a universe that puts our self-serving intuitions to shame.
The accidents of nature "conveniently" proceeded to result in life's emergence? But this is an overstatement. What's so convenient about a mostly lifeless universe? It took at least a billion years for life-sustaining planets to develop. If God wanted it to be convenient, why wouldn't he have snapped his fingers to cut to the chase? That's what Genesis says happened, in line with our childish intuitions: life was created in five days. And life was the crowning achievement, so God rested on the seventh day, after he made people.
Objectivity requires us to set aside our hubris and our anthropocentric presumptions, and to contemplate the possibility that we're not the crowning achievement, that the convenience of our relationship to nature is an illusion (as Darwin explained), and that wonders will come after we're long gone that are likewise part of no preplanning.
"Rhyme or reason" is a euphemism. There are scientific reasons for how the universe and life developed. And there's what I call a monstrous order in those processes, precisely because they're mindless but not inert. My blog that I used to write on for years before I switched to Medium was called "Rants Within the Undead God." Nature is the living-dead deity, the self-creative power and material that's comparable to the zombie monster. At least, that's how nature looks from an objective standpoint.
You can say, rather, that consciousness and mentality are ontologically fundamental, but you'll have to live with the suspicion that that outlook is conveniently consistent with our most dubious, falsified, childish intuitions about our presumed central importance.
