Organs and organisms act purposively. Even naturalists usually agree that the life-world includes goal-directed functioning. The existence of biology as a distinct discipline would never have come about except for the fact that organisms and individual organs such as ears, eyes and hearts have impressed people as having goals that nonliving beings do not. It is especially our sense that living organisms are able to strive, and that they can either fail or achieve success in their pursuit of specific goals, that has allowed humans to distinguish living beings from inanimate. It may seem somewhat ironic then that naturalism today bases its claim that the cosmos is inherently pointless not so much on physics and cosmology as on biology. The evolutionary blending of blind chance and impersonal selection with an enormity of cosmic time seems sufficient to account for the gradual, and hence nonmiraculous, emergence of complex design, including minds. There is no need for, or any sign of, any intentional cosmic agency guiding either life or the universe as a whole. Individual aspects of organisms, including DNA, may be functionally purposive, but this is not a good reason to suppose that nature as a whole is teleologically guided. Purpose has now been naturalized also.

Thus, it is evolutionary biology rather than physics that has seemingly cleansed the last vestiges of intentional divine purpose from the cosmos.