MJ Thomas Wrote:
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> I, along with tens of millions of other people,
> find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine
> Nature not having purpose.
> If Nature has purpose, then it is somehow
> intelligent.

Technically, natural selection is driven by purpose, but by the purposes of the individual rather than that of some supreme being. The purpose of any bacterium is to survive and reproduce. The purpose of any mammal is pretty much the same. Higher intelligence is just purpose of an advanced form, and to the extent that it exists only in humans, it is anthropic. Our intelligence is little more than the manifestation of an advance brain. More primitive brains such as the ganglia structure of a fly or the primitive memory of a fish do in fact exist and their manifestations also enable some kind of purpose, but we don't consider these things as embodying "intelligence". Hence, intelligence or purpose are both fundamental to natural selection.

You say that if nature has purpose than it has intelligence. You do realise thiestic evolutionists would probably agree with this statement, but disagree with the mechanism, since, in their view, evolution without divine intervention is in fact an intelligent design leading to some divine purpose. Being an agnostic, i would say the jury is still out, but there's no need to extrapolate back from divine purpose to divine intervention in evolution.

> I say again, I am quietly convinced that Evolution
> is a scientific fact, but I am not at all
> convinced (through lack of comprehension) that
> Natural Selection is the sole means by which it
> happens – lurking in there somewhere is an
> Intelligent force.

This is where intelligent design lacks consistency. For many, evolution assisted at any stage by a higher intelligence is not biological evolution at all. If you follow the tenets of the ID movement, you will find that ID is fundamentally against evolution. Behe's irreducible complexity initially seemed to target only primitive cellular structures, but one wonders, given the principle itself, why his theory doesn't apply to all of evolutionary biology. Or better yet, why is evolution by natural selection sufficient in higher organisms but not in simple cellular organisms. Later testimonies seem to confirm suspicions that ID is simply repackaged creationism.


Dar