So earlier today, I was walking by a group of trees, when I noticed too late that a twig was hanging from a web in front of me. I walked through the web, took the twig off, and went about my day. A few minutes ago, I looked over where I'd thrown my sweatshirt down, and noticed one of the little spiders that lives in the trees around here crawling on it. I stopped my homework long enough to go look at it, when a familiar train of thought started. Why exactly would a god save us? So much of our debate is around whether or not a god exists, but less often is it asked why such a being would even care about us. When I brought it up last time, I drew the analogy to the programs that generate AI in video games. Compared to our level of existence, of awareness, those programs are nothing. We feel no pity for them the same way we feel no pity for any other random piece of silicon. Why then, would an omnipotent being capable of creating and maintaining all of creation have any pity for beings with awareness as relatively (to a god) limited as ours? So I guess this may have informed my thinking when I decided to catch the spider, walk down six flights of stairs, and carry it two blocks away to the trees where I ran into it. A vague hope that, as I am to the spider, perhaps a god could be to me. That if I ever stood in judgement before one, I could point to my actions and claim that I was of a similar senseless benevolence. It may have also been because I really didn't want to look at a particularly nasty Differential Equation anymore. Now I know it's magical thinking, and it's the basis for some of the nuttier parts of religion, but if everyone thought this way, wouldn't the world be a better place? No. Of course not. Chaos is the only rule to this plane of reality. The spider I "saved" could easily have been eaten during the time it took to type this. It could have attacked another bug, or perhaps the delay I caused when crossing the street caused a car to be in just the right place for an accident 30 minutes later. My actions could be responsible for the death of a family tonight. But this chaos is the same chaos that caused a highly evolved ape to halt his study of fuel burn-up in a nuclear reactor long enough to save a creature not even aware of itself from starvation. If that's not indicative of there being a non-zero probability that we're not all doomed to oblivion, I have no idea what is. I'm going back to my homework.