Revolutionary Worker #1223, December 21, 2003, posted at rwor.org
In an interesting article entitled "A Designer Universe?" which has been reprinted in numerous publications (see, for instance, the October 21, 1999 NY Review of Books or the Sept-Oct 2001 Skeptical Inquirer ) the Nobel physicist and cosmologist Steven Weinberg explained that he finds absolutely no evidence of design in the larger universe, nor any reason to think that what are called "the constants of nature" have in any way been "fine-tuned" to provide just the right conditions for the appearance of life. He makes the point that our own existence in a corner of "our" solar system that happens to seem "ideally" suited to support life could seem at first to be rather amazing and miraculous, until you step back and realize that it's obviously only in a part of the universe that happened to already be suitable for the emergence of life that life could have evolved (and have produced intelligent creatures which think about such things) in the first place. Weinberg similarly makes the point that it wouldn't be particularly surprising if, in an unfathomably large universe (which itself may be only one of many universes, only a fraction of which may have features allowing them to support any life at all), it turns out that the largest number of planets can support no life at all, a smaller fraction of planets support only unintelligent life, and only an even tinier fraction happens to support intelligent life. So, again, it's important to situate things which appear "mysterious" or "miraculous" in a larger context and in relation to known material processes operating on a number of different levels.
Just about anything can appear somewhat "miraculous" if you don't yet understand how it came to be the way it is and especially if you don't situate it properly in relation to that larger context. Weinberg makes the insightful analogy that it's like when a reporter goes to interview a lottery winner who has just won a big jackpot: The big winner might seem to have benefited from some kind of miracle of divine intervention, until you remember the much, much greater number of lottery players who are not being interviewed because they didn't win anything ! Similarly, it could seem to some people that the fact that life exists on "our" planet means we must have benefited from some kind of "miracle" or divine design, until you remember that life as we know it could only evolve under certain environmental conditions and that--in relation to the many, many other planets and parts of the known universe which don't seem to have conditions which could support life as we know it--it's not that surprising that there would be only a much smaller number of places (such as "our" planet and likely some others) which just happened to have environmental conditions in which life could emerge (much as the chance emergence of one or a few big lottery winners doesn't seem miraculous any more when you consider the huge number of players who didn't win anything at all).
It is a demonstrated fact that, as soon as self-reproducing life emerges, it naturally starts to evolve. It does this through a combination of chance factors (such as "copying error" mutations) and non- chance factors (such as NATURAL selection, which "sorts out" reproducing individuals in relation to particular environments). The natural development of the many different (present and past) species on earth through evolution, without any supernatural "designer" having been involved, could seem hard to believe, unless and until you get a sense of how this process actually works and you put the existence of the many different species in the larger context of the operation of the evolutionary process over not just a few decades, or a few hundred or a few thousand years, but millions and billions of years.