impossible, to overcome. Yet they must be measured alongside the problems that arise if evolution is not heading towards any goal at all. We all hope for a better world, even lawyers do that; what other purpose was there in my developing the technique illustrated by the few examples I have given of legal cases? A doctor once said to me, “If you do not hope, you are ill. We must all hope”. So, is the hope we all need to have just a pious fraud? Could Christianity be based on a resurrection, which was a fraud? Could life itself have no purpose other than to barge others out of the way, and crow for a moment on the top of the dung heap in Aesop's Fable about the bantam cocks? The biologist might say that life has penetrated every crevice of creation in enormous variety; intelligent beings are simply one form of life, like any other. The end product of evolution is simply to produce the maximum and most perfect variety. For man to think he has a special role is vanity. This uncomfortably echoes what Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, “All is vanity”. But why should the biologist think that man has exhausted his potential simply because he has reached the end of his development as a biological species? Just as complicated proteins build their mirror images, divide, reconstitute themselves, and divide again apparently endlessly; if it were possible for two people to develop a relationship based on absolute trust, why should not God use this to proliferate similar relationships between other couples, in imitation of them, in endless glorious variety? It is not so different.
One can get a new perspective on the problem by projecting oneself into the role of a potential creator. What does he see? After countless ages of geological evolution life dawns, then with the increasing complexity of the central nervous system mammals appear, and finally man with his ability to think and reflect. Then there is a great ice age, or an explosion in the sun, and all is snuffed out; and you, the creator, are left wondering what the point of it…