Thanks for this thoughtful response, much food for thought here.

A question: you say "Purpose is a feature of life, not of the cosmos as a whole."

Given the near impossibility of life emerging as an accident of the laws of nature (not my view alone, Fred Hoyle and Francis Crick and others), doesn't the emergence of life carry the evidence of purpose?

As to the growing interest in non-physical explanations, I would point you to the growing interest in spirituality vs. religion, in the very great interest at the popular level of near death experiences (books, movies, etc.) and especially to the work by University of Virginia scholars as in Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism. I would also point you the Pew reports that show younger scientists are more likely to believe in God, a higher power or some form of spiritual reality than their older colleagues.

As for the complete and total explanation that you believe evolution offers, there is plenty of evidence that while the basic facts of micro evolution are without dispute (ala this dang virus), the conclusion drawn from that that it explains all of life is very much in dispute. I've written about that in several of my posts and will go into it more in future posts.

Again, thanks for your thoughtful response.