How I began to believe in teleology

If you don't have training in statistics, or science, and someone with a university education tells you life on earth randomly assembled itself you might have no reason to doubt them, after all they're a scientist.

The two dominant (and in my opinion equally unbelievable) explanations for the origin of life are:

1. abiogenesis
2. creationism

Like many modern Australians, I spent much of my school life believing the world randomly assembled life over billions of years through abiogenesis.

That might make sense, well, I guess there's no alternate explanation other than believing in creationism, and given our globalised state and the diversity of religions it's not unreasonable to assume that religions are subjective and not scientific or realistic.

While studying medical science as an undergrad at university I was exposed to genetics lectures.

I learnt that the human genome is complex, and composed of 3.2 billion base pairs.

Each nucleic base is approximately 30 atoms, so a pair may be 60 atoms.

3.2 billion bases times 60 atoms is 192 billion atoms.

I was confronted with the thought that this is a staggering amount of precision to assemble randomly.

My immediate thought when something like this is presented to me is "how do I know this is true?", and can I compare it to other phenomena to understand if this is a reasonable explanation, a realistic pattern, or a random occurrence?

Is there anything else this complex in the known universe?

If I gave you 3.2 billion coloured marbles and a football field and said "roll them randomly until you get a picture of the mona lisa", I suspect you would be rolling marbles for a very very long time and not get any picture at all, let alone the specific picture of the mona lisa.

So the question then is why did life assemble itself?

Many scientists will tell you, nothing in the universe cares, it just happened randomly.

But even if it was random, and impossible to not happen in a infinitely large universe, the hyper-parameters of organic elements are still perfect for life.

Given the choice between believing that randomly occuring periodic elements randomly assembled themself over time into random organisms that happen to be me OR believing that a grand design exists, I choose the latter.

To me, there's too many unknowns and assumptions in the former statement to make it a reasonable scientific explanation.

So, on one hand we have an event that is so statistically unlikely and random that it's the probability of it happening is for all intents and purposes zero, and on the other hand we have a grand design theory that theres an unobservable God, which many people believe the chance of happening is also zero.

We're faced with two improbable statements, the choice between believing in a random event or a god given purpose.

Even if none of the worlds religions are correct, I still believe there is a force within the universe that tilts the odds in our favor, and you may call that force or set of circumstances God.

I believe there is a God, and I believe there is a purpose.

The way I justify this, rather than just using it as a cope, is that I assume if humans historically have believed in higher powers and followed order then it must be evolutionarily or biologically significant and either advantageous or necessary within our neuropsychology to do so.

Once we understand that God wants life to exist, the next set of questions to be answered is "given that God wants life to exist, what are we to do about it?".

The answer is continuity.

A cell forms tissues; tissues form organs; humans form institutions. It's a natural continuity.

The force that tilts us towards life doesn't stop at the individual body. It continues through our institutions.

We create institutions to protect, sustain and celebrate life and diversity – they are as natural as a heart or a lung. The problem is when they become cancerous, growing out of control and attacking the host they were meant to sustain.