If the universe is conducive to life, earth and our solar system are particularly so. But we must study the role God could play in the eventual emergence of sentient beings. The key question to this is: Is evolution totally random? If the answer is "yes," religious thinkers have somewhat of a problem on their hands, but it can be surmounted. It is possible to imagine a God who created the universe and then like a watchmaker sit back and let it tick. But would this god be the kind of god that we all believe in? A supremely kind, giving being? Or would it just be one who does not care what happens to the inhabitants of the earth? It is also possible to imagine a god who set up the system and then continued to tinker with it so as to make it produce the best possible type of creature. Either way we have a Divine Being, but there is no use in praying to one who does not care what is happening, thus invalidating much of the reason for the existence of religion.

The farther our scientific knowledge extends, the more random things appear to be, therefore the more it appears that we have the former, a more aloof, less caring Deity. "The troublesome words are these: 'chance,' 'accident,' 'blind,' 'struggle,' 'violent,' 'ruthless.'"¹³ Rolston goes to great lengths to show how it is possible for random acts, both on a microscopic (the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example) and macroscopic level, can be subtly controlled from Above. These imperceptibly small changes to the "random" events that occur can never be measured by our blunt scientific instruments.

Interestingly, evolution, whether it is slow and steady or jerky, seems to be constantly moving in an upward direction, culminating in the triumph that is the human race, the most intelligent beings ever to inhabit the earth, so far as we can (scientifically!) tell. Although there is a constant upward trend, natural selection itself simply means that the "best fit" creature survives, but it does not specify whether that creature is more "advanced" or not. A less complex creature could be "better adapted" if it reproduced more offspring. Retrograde evolution would seem mathematically to be just as likely as evolution to more complex and intelligent creatures. But it does not appear to work this way. As time goes on, life seems to be getting more and more complex, thus breaking the law of thermodynamics, which states the opposite. Life is "diffusing" towards the ever more complex, but the lower forms of life are still proliferating. The only time life on average has gotten less complex is when there have been mass extinctions, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs.

There are three possibilities as to why this life is moving uphill towards increased complexity. First, evolution could just work out that way, without any influence from Above. Second, God could have created evolution so it just worked out that way, and then let it take its course. Third, God could constantly be pushing evolution ever-upward. Is it possible that God is bound by the system that He may have created? Gould thinks so: "Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components."¹⁴ There is no religious answer, and certainly no scientific answer to these questions.

Is this even an irreversible trend? This leaves open the question of whether or not the human race will survive indefinitely. Science tells us that we have only been here for a fraction of a second in the day that has been the history of the planet. So it is not necessarily clear that we will survive for a long time. It is not necessarily true that we are the most well-adapted creature for the planet. We may have had a neutral mutation (that is, neutral so far) which made us too warlike and hateful of others or too uncaring towards the environment to survive for a long time. It would be easy for us to cause our own extinction, thus erasing our genes from the gene pool, we could naturally select ourselves out of existence, as it were. This would lower the level of complexity found in nature, just as the extinction of the dinosaurs did eons ago. Maybe the next step in evolution is for us to take full control of our genes through recombinant DNA techniques now becoming feasible, and making whatever we want as progeny, or maybe we will supplant ourselves with fully sentient androids, which seems like it could be another possibility. At any rate, for us to survive at all, we absolutely need to attend to the environmental and nuclear problems. Religion and science are united on this point: It is the moral imperative for the survival of the race to be peaceful and sympathetic to the environment.

There are nonetheless three evolutionary mysteries or coincidences which seem to point to God's existence. These are things which seem a little too convenient to have happened at random. (Then again, maybe in all the vastness of the universe earth is the only place they did happen, and thus the only place where observers can be found to document these things.) First, Rolston brought up was that the human brain was far more powerful than would ever be naturally selected for. "The mind is doing an order of thinking that could never have been naturally selected for, that indeed might almost have been selected against."¹⁵ We could reproduce just as often without being able to perform complex mathematical computations and ponder deep philosophical questions. Nomadic life on the African savannah would not be improved at all by being able to calculate pi to the 87^th decimal point, but we can do that. This unnecessarily high level of intelligence seems in a way to point to the existence of God. Second, we not only developed large brains, but also hands, so that they could work together to form an intelligent and capable creature. One without the other is useless. Large brains without the ability to perform work would not lead to an intelligent society, because no communication or tools would ever form. However, hands and mouth without brain become skilled, but cannot ponder complex problems like we do today. Both happened to coincide with each other, which combine to form a superior life form. Conversely, it could be argued that the two are bound to evolve together, one causes the need for the other. Third, Rolston and Gould both think we just happen to be the correct size to thrive, Rolston speaking universally, Gould speaking biologically.¹⁶ These are fundamental concepts, but if altered, they, along with the precarious position of the primordial soup, could negate life as we know it, or at least the human race.

The question of randomness deserves further attention. If I am about to be hit from a bus, and the bus swerves out of the way, should I thank God and my own previous deeds of moral worth, or should I simply thank the bus driver? It depends on one's belief system. Does God influence subtly all the events that occur everywhere, so as to shape the world to His liking? It is conceivable either way. That is the problem. We have no answers, only numerous questions. "[A] few atomic changes can have a dramatic real-life effect. . . . Especially near thresholds, microscopic variations can have great macroscopic results."¹⁷ Had a particular synapse misfired (due to a few molecules reacting in a different way), the bus driver might hit the pedestrian, but if something small inside their brain clicks quickly enough, they just may be able to save the pedestrians life. God could be tinkering with us constantly, or he could be an aloof watchmaker. Luckily, because we have so much order in the world, synapses tend to fire correctly, and thus people are saved from being hit by buses.¹⁸

All this talk of randomness eventually leads to the question of the nature of God. One question frequently often dealt with by religion and often used to invalidate it: How can a benevolent and omnipotent God allow so much evil and suffering to exist in the world? "If God watches the sparrows fall, God must do so from a great distance."¹⁹ The simple answer for this is that suffering was built into the system. Rolston makes two exceptional points about suffering which I had never thought of before. First, he points out that "the capacity to suffer is generally accompanied by possibilities of avoiding suffering."²⁰ Therefore, the more complex a creature is, the more it can suffer. Concomitant to that, the more complex a creature is, the more joy it can receive from life. Along with good, evil must come. We start out with plants, which do not suffer at all, move up to earthworms, which suffer a little bit, and finally to humans, which suffer more than any other organism. This is not just humans trying to prove that we can suffer the most, when we really have no idea how much other creatures suffer, as we have no first-hand knowledge; it is backed up by scientific fact.

Animals and birds typically have fewer nerve endings per surface area unit of skin, for instance; and the level of consciousness, self-awareness, or experience, or whatever is the proper name for their experiential state, is very different from, more subdued than, less intense and coherent than our own.²¹

Secondly, he points out that it is precisely this suffering that leads to greater forms of life. Mutations are the key to evolution, but most mutations create horribly deformed organisms. Mutations are the reason for our existence, but at the same time are greatly feared by expecting couples. Mutations are therefore good when looking at the gestalt, but usually bad in an individual case. All of life's beauty and diversity has been created by desirable mutations, which form a minuscule percentage of all possible mutations. Once again, one must take the good with the bad.

The system, though, is both cruel and clumsy, according to Rolston. Why would a benevolent Designer do it this way? It seems as if God could have created a system where there were no "bad" mutations, but then it would have been too easy to believe in Him, and there would be no reason to have faith. "The world is not a paradise of hedonistic ease, but a theater where life is learned and earned by labor, a drama where even the evils drive us to make sense of things. Life is advanced not only by thought and action but by suffering, not only by logic buy by pathos." It had to be this way, for it is exactly the death and suffering we face which eventually leads to all beauty and intelligence. Without struggle there would be natural selection, and thus no human beings, eventually. In other words, God couldn't possibly have created "a paradise of hedonistic ease," because first of all it wouldn't work, at least by any standard we can imagine, and second of all, His existence would be too obvious (more on this in the next section). [Then again, maybe I am just saying this because that is the way our universe worked out and the way thing are is the what I am used to. Maybe I am just trying to retro-justify a matter of happenstance.]

The related question "Why is there death?" is easily answered. Death is just a subset of suffering. The reason for it could be that God wants to give each subsequent generation an equal chance to enjoy life. So, the way the universe was set up, it would physically be impossible not to have death, natural selection never would have worked. Also, there just is not enough room for every individual to keep on living. Like you said in lecture, if the students of a school never left, there would be no room for the incoming class of freshmen. "If nothing much had ever died, nothing much could have ever lived."²²