@MontereyJack,
MontereyJack wrote:
great things can come out of infinitesimal beginnings with time and if the right chemical raw materials happen to be there.
Forms just change and evolve over time. Energy isn't created or destroyed, so it just keeps manifesting changes, transformation, reformations, etc. of existing forms and systems.
Sometimes the results are good and sometimes they're less good, but either way they keep changing and evolving and adapting.
The interesting thing is that humans have developed/evolved the capacity to see how things work, foresee consequences of choices, and exercise the will to make a certain choice based on how they estimate it will influence causal patterns as we understand them.
This capacity is not totally absent in animals, as you may notice that a dog can scratch at a door or bring a leash to a human with the idea that the human will respond by opening the door or taking the dog for a walk.
But humans have the capacity to think on all sorts of different levels and contemplate all sorts of different interventions in natural patterns of cause and effect that alter natural outcomes, even to the point that we are changing the overall climate of the planet.
Theism is the recognition that these mental and spiritual capacities that humans have evolved to manifest at the highest level we are aware of are not a random occurrence of life at a particular stage of evolution but rather are a manifestation/expression of something latent in the potential of the universe at a fundamental level.
So when we contemplate things like consciousness, intelligence, intent, agency, will, etc. we shouldn't just look for analogs in other species like dogs, but we should trace these analogs all the way back/out to the most general level and try to see even how they arose in living organisms as a result of aspects of non-living matter-energy phenomena from which life evolved.
The point is the God's master-plan is omnipresent in the universe, the same way DNA is omnipresent in all forms of life-as-we-know-it. We just have to keep looking for it, the same way biologists and chemists had to keep looking at (studying) cellular biology until the discovered the existence of DNA and how it functions to manifest all the various proteins that build up the systems of a complex multicellular organism.