Does nature have purpose?  No, said Alan Lightman in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.  Nature, he insists, "is purposeless."  As letter writers who agreed with him observed, clearly, something that is really no more than a physical force cannot possibly have purpose.  It just is.
     Another writer, however, remarked that, au contraire, nature has purpose.  Its purpose is to create more life.  To this, we must ask how can a thing, an unconscious thing (this does not mean that the entities that share this "thing" (nature) are unconscious, however), really, in and of itself, sense purpose?  How can a "thing" really know that it is doing what it is doing?  Does nature really create life because it wants to?  Or does it create life because of how it is constituted or made?
     The more important question, it seems, is this:  why is conscious life here, anyway?  Who or what decided that?  Therein, it seems, is the source of purpose.  Knowing this may also enable us to answer an even more important question:  why does purpose even exist?