Nature driven by a force outside nature...

The largely unheralded insight gained from the Human Genome Project completed in 2003, is that the DNA codes for the cell's building blocks, the information needed to build the rest of the creature, is seemingly, in large measure, absent.

Physician James Le Fanu writes in a fascinating new book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon):

The same master genes that cause a fly to have the form of a fly cause a mouse to have the form of a mouse. The physically encoded information to form that mouse, as opposed to that fly, isn't there. Instead, "It is as if the 'idea' of the fly (or any other organism) must somehow permeate the genome that gives rise to it."

Such an understanding, of nature driven by a force outside nature, was dominant in biology before Darwin. Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) held that there was an unknown biological "formative impulse," an organizational principle of some kind that directed the formation of diverse kinds of life.

"O LORD, I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well" (Psalm 139:14).