Were we made? Did life just happen? As for the origin of our universe, this quandary will likely persist to perplex humans living in whatever future they eventually create for themselves. But while the ultimate answer seems debatable, allowing questions regarding purpose, place, and function to go unexplored, from either perspective, seems a wasted opportunity to discover something new. The natural world, wherever we have found it, almost always supports some kind of life form.

Regardless of how inhospitable the environment, we discover organisms with clever and bizarre physiology tailor-made to make the best use of available resources there. These organisms obtain food, breed, defend their territory, and flesh out a sustainable living for themselves in ways we don't yet fully understand. Our ideas regarding what kind of biological mechanisms actually constitute life are being modified almost as frequently as we discover these new places where life has taken hold and flourished.  Just when we surmise we've exhausted the limits of life's conceivable tolerance extremes, we kick over a fresh rock, or peek under a hidden puddle, and discover another more beautiful and confounding universe teaming with more new life forms we won't fully understand for years to come.

Scientists, biologists, mathematicians, astronomers and people of all philosophical viewpoints can't stare into that next great land beyond the nose without experiencing genuine wonder about how in the world it got here. This is the most basic human experiential commonality query: The Origin of Everything. If we can know the answer to that, we imagine, and then we can know the answers to anything knowable. Humanity of almost every age harbors a shared fantasy in which, after we learn the Origin answer, we'll be able to confront whatever that answer to that question is. Our experience in this endeavor is scarcely above elementary; barely enough to get us onto some thin science-versus-creation ice-rarely the best course if increasing knowledge if the goal.

No matter how implausible and complex the coping mechanisms we find in nature are, we human beings shall always devise a way in which to spotlight our differing core convictions regarding Origin. At best, this usually leads to needless division; at worst a seething animosity. We on all sides of the Origin debate must, if we're to retain any shared benefit from what we learn from nature, set aside our most contended conclusions, and choose instead to meet where we're consciously able, even if that place shifts every so often with evidence to the contrary.