text: I don't want to hurt your feelings, because I sense that you are serious (very serious) in what you say. But, with respect,  you sometimes sound like a paragraph from the Catechism rather than a person who, I know, has a jolly-good brain
  
  Here's further to what I think. Yes, God loves my parents and me, but I am not the direct issue of that love, but of my parents love for each other. This is something over which God had no control, since love must be free to be itself: love cannot be ordered or enforced. So with my conception (as with all creation), there is, as it were, an element of chance: of random occurrence. 
  
  I do not believe,  with the psalmist, that God 'knit me together in my mother's womb': no; chance did.  That kind of literal thinking would, in one sense, make me a Muslim, a believer in Ash' arism. This theological school holds that God acts by First Causes rather than through Natural Law.