Isn't it better if it's all a fluke?
I find myself asking this question regularly. I'm fairly confident in where I'm at with faith and, you know, the nature of the cosmos... But there's that insistent question mark right?
In the subculture in which I grew up, there is this idea that the ways in which Earth is so finely-tuned to promote life that it must mean there is a God. This is presumably a personal God deeply invested in not only the fate of humanity in general but the fate of each human specifically--invested in such a way that this God sent his Son to Earth to be one of these humans as part of the plan to redeem and recapture the created order.
This is the nugget at the center of the Christian worldview. This worldview has been enacted in many different ways across time and space, but the God's involvement in the world in some direct way is important to it. And the supposed "fine-tuning" mentioned above is often taken as a proof of it.
Whatever one thinks about the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, as far as we know, we're it. To me, that exclusivity and apparent serendipity of circumstances that allows life on Earth doesn't scream intention but the opposite. If it's such a small chance that just the right settings would be turned on to allow for such life, then yeah it's probably random. It's definitely not evidence for the Christian story, which is just one of the many stories humans have used to explain consciousness.
Isn't that way more comforting anyway? There's so much less pressure there. Maybe I'm just speaking out of my own Evangelical neurosis, but if there's no grand plan, then I don't have to freak out trying to find my place in it. This whole existence deal may be a fluke, but that's okay. I'm here. You're here. We'll continue to make our own meaning together.
