actually a few more comments. The dichotomy I am seeing is not between creationism and evolution but between purposelessness and teleology. It is related, but not the same.

'Evolution does not progress by chance but by selection'.

But as I understand it, mutations occur by chance; those that are adaptive tend to proliferate, those that are not adaptive, or destructive (the majority of changes) don't proliferate. So in that sense chance is a main driver of evolution. Jacques Monod put it as 'chance and necessity' - things come about by chance, but then there are inevitable consequences. The idea that purposeful changes occur is lamarckism, it it not? So that purpose, in this sense, is ruled out by evolutionary theory as we understand it. As are any ideas of teleology, things happening for a purpose other than the adaptive benefit that they provide.

But what of the idea that at some level, there is a tendency for particular types of thing to happen, so that they are lawful, even if they are, in another sense, random? So that, given a set of circumstances, some specific outcomes are likely. When you look at the complexities of organic chemistry, as remarked previously, there are hundreds of billions of ways for the same basic molecules to combine that are not going to culiminate in any kind of adaptive behaviours (therefore life). As it happens those that have favoured life have come about (obviously, otherwise we would not be having this dialog.) Now how could you prove, or disprove, an hypothesis about whether things are inclined to happen one way or another? Ideally, you would look for a world system which appeared to have 'all the ingredients' but was nonetheless barren. We are obviously not in a position to have that.

Yet I hear an echo of the whole anthropic principle in this situation. Again I find myself asking, this idea of randomness, or of chance, is being given an awful lot of responsibility in this picture. Now as you have already pointed out, my knowledge of biology is pretty minimal, but I still think this is a valid philosophical question. I have read quite a bit of Richard Dawkins, there are many areas where I would never consider arguing against him, but in terms of this specific question - the nature of the role of chance and consequent adaptive behaviours in the evolution of life - I think there are major questions.

I found in an article related to that Wired article that was quoted above:

"a growing number of scientists do say that neo-Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain certain jumps in biological complexity: from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from single organisms to entire communities.

The jumps — saltations, in complexity parlance — appear to be non-linear emergent phenomena, the result of networked interactions that produce self-organization at ever higher levels. From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is a mechanism of a higher universal law, perhaps even a variant on the second law of thermodynamics."

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/complexity-theo/