The beginning stage of any physical event (or social movement, or development of a human being, or just about anything else that occurs over time) is of ultimate importance for the continuation of that event. Once the ball gets rolling, forces of inertia tend to keep it going, but it is getting the ball rolling in the first place that is crucial. Rolston has a great analogy for this, which notes that the spark which creates a conflagration can easily be put out by a few drops of water or the way the leaves happen to be arranged in the area where it lands, but once it ignites, it will be nearly impossible to stop, and pushed ever onward by its own prodigious force. This concept is important for two reasons: 1) If the first few nanoseconds after the Big Bang had gone any differently, the character of the universe would be very different, probably unrecognizable to us if we could somehow see what it would have been like; and 2) If the point at which amino-acids first coagulated into a living thing had been any different, we probably would not be using DNA as a code for life, nor would any of the basic features common to all life, enzymes, hormones, cells, amino-acids, proteins, etc., be in existence the way they are. Everything just happens to work the way it does just because it happened that way in the beginning. It is easy for the hand of God to influence the primordial soup, and gotten those first molecules to react in a certain way. Once something as complicated as an enzyme that splits DNA into two strands to function in a cell, but once that has happened, it is naturally selected for, and perpetuated indefinitely by the same forces that act on all life. There are thousands of examples of complicated parts of organisms for which it is hard to imagine how they ever came into being, but once established, become part of everything that evolves after. Because of the importance of beginnings it becomes exceptionally important to understand how these early events shaped the evolution of life. "The question is not of the evolution of species but of the evolution of self-replicating metabolism, on which natural selection can begin to work."⁹ Right now, this is a relative mystery, but one day the answer may be discovered. If this happens, the outer limits of science will once again expand, and the body of questions answerable only by religion will once again contract. What is true for life on earth is true for the universe as a whole -- the beginning created the way it would work, and in both cases, the beginning created a way that was conducive to life.