I look at all the other animals on the Earth. None of them seem to have a high degree of self-consciousness (maybe whales and elephants, but who knows). So you can go two ways with it. Either human consciousness is a random mutation that is not required by the program of life on this planet (whatever that program may be); or, human intelligence is the high point of the evolution of life, the thing to which life for a billion years has always been tending and seeking to achieve. Since life has, quite obviously, evolved from simple one-celled organisms to much more complex organisms, it is clear that it has a direction, and this implies a purpose. Whether that direction is exemplified by human self-consciousness is the question. I tend to think it is. I tend to believe that life has been seeking self-awareness all along, for the past billion years, and only recently, in the past five million years or so, has it started to find it. But you can look at it another way, and compare the lives of individual human beings to the leaves on a tree. The tree is the human species, and each leaf is an individual human being. Now ask yourself: how much importance does a single leaf have in the life of a tree? And more than this, how much importance does a single leaf have to the *Creator of the tree*? When a leaf turns brown and falls off, do the angels really weep? That seems kind of unlikely, don't it?