With the whole 'everything had to have something that came before it' thing, isn't time just a matter of perspective? I mean, time is just a way for living things to make sense of the world. Maybe it's not more of a solid, real thing than your perception of colours.

Of course if that's true then maybe things in the future can influence things in the past, or they're interlinked or something. Maybe there are kind of weird patterns that effect the order everything occurs in, like maybe there's a bias toward intelligence/ life developing in one place or something.

Personally I find it hard to believe that intelligent civilisation just randomly evolved here but nowhere else in the universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox). It's a bit like when you think of all the trillions of possible ways things could have gone that would have led to you not being born, whereas there was only one, ridiculously unlikely chain of events that would lead to your birth. And the latter happened, just by chance.

It'd be like waking up one morning to find the winning lottery tickets from ten different countries that had just happened to fall from the buyers' pockets outside your house, because those lottery ticket buyers were all taking random day breaks in your town/ country. And then Richard Dawkins would just reply to that "well, it had to happen eventually, to someone.".