Questions that atheists can provide no good answer for:

[DanTex]

228. I am speculating that without a higher power, nothing would be the default, yes.

I justify this because nothing is the simplest outcome. A universe with matter and energy and complex, highly mathematical laws is certainly not the simplest outcome. There is certainly no logical reason that anything should exist. The existence of anything is something cause or a reason.

It's a little different from your example of orderly structures in nature without human activity. There, we already know the physical laws according to which a system evolves. But even in that case, yes, by default I would not expect an orderly geometric structure without human involvement. And most of the time I would be right -- that picture you posted (which is great, by the way) is a rare example, most of the time nature doesn't produce that sort of thing. It produces order, but not that kind of geometric order.

But in any case, with nature, we're talking about things that can arise given physical laws that are known. Nobody knows the laws the govern existence versus non-existence of anything at all. We can't do experiments. All we know is that there is a universe with certain physical laws. We have one observation. So I fall back to basic logic, the only thing that I can think of to reason about that. And logically, if there were no higher power, one (at least I) would not expect there to be a physical universe.