Nick Lane

I find it a little...

almost disturbing.

And I have to say, I'm not a religious person either, but neither am I... I don't object to religion.

I'm not a militant atheist at all.

I rather

I like the fact that religions have searched for meaning, searched for origins, and I have some kind of fellow feeling with that search.

And I suppose truth in some sense, with a small t in my own case.

But insofar as this is consistent with the idea of a god, the god would be a deist god that effectively set the laws of the universe in motion and they're left to play out.

Now, you know, this is kind of Einstein's God, really.

In terms of what most people understand by God, I think most people look for comforting God and are looking for something which is meaningful to them and who's been involved in humanity.

And so this is a very cold kind of situation.

God as thermodynamics sets the laws of the universe in motion, reproducibly gives rise to the same kinds of things.

Yes, you could interpret it in a kind of theistic, natural theistic way, but I don't think many people would get that much comfort or meaning from that way of seeing the world.

Yeah.

Well, there's probably more than one bottleneck, but Eukaryotes is, in my own mind, the big one, yes.

I mean, only on Earth.

No, I don't think so.

But is there... I suppose what I would dig my heels in a little bit is there's a...

the kind of Carl Sagan cosmological view that once you've got, you know, we're talking about the inevitability almost of life arising according to these laws of chemistry and thermodynamics and so on, and you get life.

And then is it going to roll on and inevitably give rise to complex life and to humans and to intelligence?