[hughlomas]

As far as consciousness goes, where do you draw the line? At what point are creatures merely programmed by instinct, mechanical in their nature? Rotifers [0]? Nematodes? Flatworms? Ants? Where do you decide that consciousness suddenly appears and that it necessarily requires a "designer"? It's evident from the span of existing nervous systems that response to external stimuli is a basic trait of animals, and indeed even plants that lack a nervous grow towards light, and amoebas move along concentration gradients.

Natural selection acts on randomness, natural selection itself is the antithesis of random chance. I mean no offense, but your statements reveal a lack of understanding of the potential and strength of evolution by natural selection in general. It is elegant in its simplicity. Basically, given a stable replicator, make variations on it and those that continue to replicate will necessarily have some differential in survival, sometimes due to the variations. This is clearly explained in a segment of The Blind Watchmaker [1], where generations of an aerofoil shape are varied at random, but selected for their lift potential. Please give the short segment of the video a few minutes of your time, I think it is a wonderfully intuitive explanation of the core of natural selection.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotifer#Nervous_system

[1] http://youtu.be/Ok_tcAEbHHw?t=31m42s