WhimsicalWonder wrote: Tangible individual human construction is evidence of intelligence on earth. It does not logically follow that "creation" has a "creator" because it presupposes that we were "created". The argument is terribly flawed from the start.
.. I'll be dipped if I can't see right through something this obvious.
Thanks WW. You are absolutely right that we must abandon all thought of creationism and intelligent design in order to understand evolution. Richard Dawkins presents a devastating critique of the ‘intelligent designer’ theory of Paley in his book The Blind Watchmaker.
Thanks also for picking up the lack of clarity and precision in my comment “nature itself does provide a sort of guiding intelligence”. My overly condensed comment illustrates how hard it can be to discuss such topics well.
How I see evolution is that nature provides the boundary conditions within which organisms can evolve. For example, our current efforts to pile CO2 into the air are rapidly changing the boundary conditions for many organisms, such as plants and animals on mountains whose habitat is shrinking into mountain islands as the temperature rises. More broadly, parameters for evolution include the laws of physics.
I was using ‘intelligence’, perhaps wrongly, to refer to these natural parameters. Of course this is bending the usual meaning of the term, because intelligence is a property of thought, and thought requires a thinker. There is no thinker for evolution, so there is no intelligence in this usual sense. However, we can also say that the laws of physics have a mathematical existence independent of their discovery in human thought. Planets were moving according to the law of gravity long before it was formulated in Newton’s inverse square law. So in this sense, we can say the universe has a natural intelligence, in that things obey mathematical laws regardless of whether people are there to see them.
An implication here is that ability to discern the natural intelligence of the universe is an adaptive quality for evolution. Any organism that finds a new way to exploit and expand its biological niche is in this sense increasing its complexity and expanding its natural intelligence. Trees evolve to compete for the sunlight, but this does not mean they have brains. It does, though, point to a mechanical process that has a strong correlation with human intelligence.
We can also analyse God against this framework of natural intelligence. Religion is an effort to answer the question how can we be saved. The traditional Christian answer, “believe in Jesus”, is generally now seen as bereft of real content. Atheists tend to say this means religion is entirely maladaptive. I would rather argue that religion presents an effort to understand reality, and that the concept of God can adapt to modern scientific findings, pointing a path towards human adaptation to the natural intelligence of the universe. We can define purpose and meaning in terms of how we can best adapt to scientific law. I’m sorry if this is too contorted a usage of the term intelligence, but it makes sense to me.
What we perceive as hard objects in front of us is simply our brain registering certain combination of atoms interacting with one another in a certain way. The look of the stone is how our brain READS those atom combinations and then presents it to us to interpret it. There is SOMETHING out there, but is it as what it looks-a STONE? Quantum physics is so fascinating! Have you seen "What the bleep do we know?" 
