@Lisa Dyer Thanks for joining the group, Lisa, and for your seemingly rather straightforward question. For many religious people, the answer is seemingly straightforward too: as taught by the Bible, God the Creator created humans. But it isn’t really an ultimate answer because one can continue to ask: who created God? Now the challenge has shifted: at first, the question was to explain the origin of humans who are known to obviously exist, however, with that answer, a new question has been raised — how to explain the origin of God who’s not known to obviously exist. That’s no answer at all. The correct way to answer your question is to deconstruct it: more specifically, to deconstruct the notion of creation. Whatever exists is but a form of energy — in the forms of humans, animals, vegetation, bacteria, clouds, and what not. Any perceived action of creation is in fact merely transformation of energy: every part of the universe plays a role in the formation of anything in the universe, be it a grain of sand, a mountain, a grasshopper, or a human being. Amidst all these transformations, one thing remains constant: energy conserves. More specifically, angular momentum conserves. This transformation of nature and within nature is the true meaning of Darwin’s evolutionary theory: humans are part of this evolutionary process just like all the insects, all the stars and all the galaxies. To look for the details of this evolutionary process, to find out about all the forms and structures and functions, to figure out the causal relationships, constitutes science or the pursuit of knowledge. To appreciate the wonders of the universe, of the transforming nature, of which we are an integral part, constitutes genuine spirituality — something humanity as a whole hasn’t evolved to acquire yet.