The origin of life and the universe is not a typical water-cooler conversation, but in an increasingly secular world, nagging questions remain. Problems for which relativists, atheists, and secularists can’t answer with certainty. Well, no one can; that’s the beauty of mystery, but the uniqueness of reality suggests the need for more debate.
On the science side, there are variables that, if they were even the slightest bit different, suggest none of this nor any of us could exist. There’s a lot of luck involved or, as advocates would suggest, evidence of design. I’m sure it is also a “we don’t know what we don’t know” problem, so I’ll stray from that universe into one more my speed and still on topic (at least in the universe of my consciousness), using government in pursuit of progressive perfectionism.
There is an apolitical idea held by groups who are increasingly more secular than theist that someone (them, actually) can use their superpowers (legislation, rules, force of law, and even a police state) to usher in the utopia on earth. A perfectly functioning pile of millions of otherwise disparate moving bits that result in heaven on earth. A mortal political paradise – while you as an individual (in their context) are not allowed or perhaps even capable of knowing what your ideal life or world might look like. Despite the frightening similarities (homo sapiens sapiens), it is not within you to know how individual peace or prosperity might look. What it would feel like. In their mind, you are more likely a barrier on the road to utopia.
This perfect place can only be achieved by their design. A vision precipitated by their will into which you will confine yourself in deference to the illusion that they can not only know but make your life better, but each and every one of the over 300 million of you in the United States, at the same time.
For a bunch of secular humanists, this sounds very much like the theocracy that tells you to fear wherein you will play the role assigned so that you might one day achieve thanks to a government that always hunger, led by people who never starve, in pursuit of a perfection that never arrives.
The Intelligent design of an all-seeing oligarchic god-king without whom it would have been impossible.
The difference, of course, is the first cause. We do not know where all the matter in the universe came from or if there was a designer from where they came. Oligarchic god-kings or governments that behave like them are allowed to create themselves, and in our case, with the will or indifference of the people.
We allowed them to heap disdain on the paradise we had, a messy and imperfect arrangement but the best chance for true liberty in the arc of human history, whether you think it was ordained by God or not. In the end, the problem with people is always people who cannot imagine a power greater than themselves, whether it is the designer of the universe or their constituents.
