Like Abraham and Joseph Smith, looking up at the stars has from pre-history filled the hearts and minds of people with religious and scientific wonder. Thinking about the astonishing discoveries found in the Universe, I paused to consider like Moses, “that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.” (Moses 1:10). It has been said that the number of stars that exist are beyond calculating. That is still true, but now scientific exploration of the cosmos shows that galaxies cannot be numbered. Still more impressive is that space contains more than stars and planets. At any given place can be seen black holes, clouds of assorted material, radiation and light, and even dark matter where there was once thought to be nothing. The massiveness of what is out there can be too much to contemplate.

Yet, Jesus is quoted in Luke 12:7, saying, “But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.” How can the Deity that answers prayers and watches over billions also do the same for infinitesimal amounts of material with possibly other life elsewhere he is responsible for? Perhaps He doesn’t have to be directly in control of every particle ever in existence. Free will can account for some events that He is aware of, without necessarily micro-managing.

My thoughts about this subject started while reading about the Heart of the Milky Way in the National Geographic magazine. The description of a black hole called Sagittarius A* in the center of our galaxy had me astonished:

Every now and then, the black hole swallows a bit of gas, a wayward planet, or even an entire star. Friction and gravity heat the victim to such high temperatures that it lets out a scream of x-rays. These light up nearby gas clouds, preserving a record of the black hole’s past feasts. For example, in 2004 scientists reported an x-ray echo in a gas cloud some 350 light-years from the black hole. Since x-rays travel at the speed of light, the echo indicates that an object fell into the black hole around 350 years ago. The x-ray intensity suggests it had the mass of a small planet. Another object took the plunge as recently as the 1940s.

Surprisingly, the black hole also catapults stars away. In 2005 astronomers reported an extraordinarily fast-moving star some 200,000 light-years from the galactic center. “It was serendipitous,” says Warren Brown at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He was searching for “star streams”—remnants of small galaxies the Milky Way’s gravitational pull has torn to shreds—when he found a star in the constellation Hydra racing away from the galactic center at 709 kilometers a second, or 1.6 million miles an hour. At that speed, it will escape the galaxy’s grasp and sail off into intergalactic space. By 2010 Brown and other astronomers had discovered 15 more of these hypervelocity stars.

Here were stars that lived and died by the ferocity of a single mindless phenomena. No doubt this destruction, redirection, and creation could be found at countless places that haven’t been observed by human eyes. The Universe seems so Lovecraftian in its randomness. As I have stated before, no mortal human life stands a chance of survival beyond the restricted atmosphere of Earth or artificial craft. Once that protection is dropped, death would be instant and without remorse.

Mormons tend to argue the existence of evil and suffering is for us to learn. What is not discussed as much is how does Heavenly Father achieve that education? After thinking on the Universe I wonder if He creates and then leaves alone for intelligence to (mostly) exist on its own. It is the old idea that He is a watchmaker that makes the gears, winds it up, and then lets it tick. I believe this might help explain both the often randomness of life and also situate that controversial Evolution in the Gospel. After all, Abraham 3: 2-19 reads as a mechanical observation of both stars and intelligence, with orbits and celestial magnitudes determining the movement of each. When the Earth was created, “the Gods watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed.” (Abraham 4: 18), including life. This can be interpreted to mean that what is made can then be left alone and observed until there has to be an intervention.

This isn’t to say we aren’t cared for, as the sparrow quote mentions. What it does mean is that perhaps prayers aren’t answered and pain or death not stopped because mortality is allowed to be far more random than thought. Chaos is a teaching tool to make us stronger or weaker according to our own free wills (Mosiah 16:10-12), either to spiritual destruction or exaltation. The universal forces that strip stars of energy can also be a breeding ground for whole new solar systems. Likewise, the forces that can cause the most pain and suffering are just as likely to bring out the best in others. Perhaps Heavenly Father lets most things alone until there is a compelling reason (that only He can understand) to do some tweaking.