Purpose not Design

I have already argued God is no designer.  In a fascinating sequence starting on page 197, Martin shows how Dawkins smuggles a purposeful intelligence into the evolutionary process.  In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins calculates the chances of producing haemoglobin by the random processes of evolution are 1 in 10¹⁵⁰.  But he takes a 'neat side-step' around this problem.

Let us say we attempted to type the words METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL by chance.  This would take an immense amount of time.  However, if an observer were to examine every meaningless jumble of letters and were able to retain sequences that however slightly resemble the target phrase, then it would take far less time to arrive at the target.  I will make three comments on this approach.

1. Martin points out Dawkins appears to have forgotten evolution is supposed to be mindless.  How is evolution supposed to know in advance it must retain certain letters in certain positions and which others to reject?  By some sleight of hand, Dawkins has introduced purpose into a process that is supposed to be blind or unconscious.
2. It does seem to me that typing letters are a poor analogy to natural selection.  The letters are selected according to a prepared plan.  Substitute genes and the question has to be asked in what sense can sequences, quite unlike the target haemoglobin, be selected?  It is the phenotype that natural selection acts upon.  Does the current organism fit the current environment, yes or no?  Intermediate sequences od DNA cannot be selected in this way.
3. Bizarrely, in his model Dawkins seems to adopt the so-called Christian God who has a plan.  The target sequence of type has already been realised in the mind of the observer.  The task is to manipulate the sequence of letters to get there.  There's enough trouble with fundamentalists mistrepresenting God in this way without atheists renaming it evolution and rushing to their rescue.

One of the objections to my suggestion that God is not a designer is the initial conditions of the universe.  Apparently, according to the Anthropic Principle, these initial conditions are highly unlikely.  Surely the universe as a whole has a designer?  The immediate answer that springs to mind is that there might be millions of attempts to form universes and we're living in the one that came out able to support life.  This does not feel like an adequate explanation to me.

If we think about the evolution of living things, I think we can see this as a conversation between God and matter.  Two consciousnesses in conversation.  This is of course a tacit conversation, a conversation without words.  God initiates and matter responds in unexpected ways to God's initiative.  It is in the nature of matter to respond to God in unexpected ways.  The plan is not pre-ordained but emerges from the dialogue between God and matter.

For this to happen matter must be capable of responding.  It is not so much that the universe was designed as this is the type of universe that can enter into conversation with God.