I'm not suggesting a separate God who is tinkering with creatures and plants, etc, like a cosmic player playing a big computer game, Steve.

I'm suggesting that the indwelling intelligence that is ALIVE in each living thing has a tendency to steer it in directions which meet that living thing's desire to improve itself. That, to me, is evolution.

Yes, mistakes are also made, and mistakes lead to dead ends and sometimes to the destruction of the organism.

When you have intelligence at all, and can make decisions, mistakes are an ever-present risk, aren't they? But improvement is likewise an ever-present possibility, and therein lies the challenge of life.

You keep talking about "God" the same way a religious fundamentalist does: as if "God" was "out there" somewhere being the controller. (And you oppose that notion. Well, so do I.)

I am talking about something that exists innately within all of us and is NOT outside of us controlling us...but which IS what we are in the most intimate sense...the very life force and consciousness that moves in us and has its being in us and in everything else that is alive. We temporarily carry that life force and express it during our short physical lives here. Some of us realize that it is holy. Some of us don't.