Neither arbitrary nor absurd

Yesterday, after naming Paul Davies's Cosmic Jackpot as the Prospero's Books Book of the Year, I spent some time skimming the book again, especially the notes I have made in it. Here's a passage that stands in contrast with Richard Dawkins's portrayal, in The God Delusion, of religion and science as polar opposites:

. . . there were religions, especially monotheistic faiths, which encouraged belief in a created world order. The founding assumption of science is that the physical universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd; it is not just a meaningless jumble of objects and phenomena haphazardly juxtaposed. Rather, there is a coherent scheme of things. This is often expressed by the simple aphorism that there is order in nature (6).