Directed Evolution (A weak form of Intelligent Design):
Possible Convergence of the Scientific and Spiritual Descriptions of the Universe

Introduction
Perhaps there is some mechanism which is on the one hand naturalistic while on the other hand spiritual-like, and as science develops an understanding of that mechanism, the description will sound more and more like a description of a spiritual process.
Particularly, as we begin to analyze complex systems, and come up with a theory of mind, if may turn out that the universe is some type of organic whole, and that it mirrors mind in some manner. If so, it is possible that phenomena which were formerly relegated to 'religion' or 'the supernatural' will come to be seen as part of 'the natural order'. As a result there may eventually be a convergence of the scientific and spiritual types of description of our universe.

Hierarchy from physical to spiritual, and the present-day attitude of science
This however does NOT imply that there's a conflict between religion and science regarding the soul. Those who believe there is a soul, believe it is a spiritual entity and not physical. Everyone agrees no-physical cannot evolve as a result of physical events, and so if there is a soul God could have implanted it in humans separately from the process of evolution, when the human body/brain evolved to the complexity sufficient to become capable of associating itself to that soul.
To the extent that something eg mind or soul is spiritual, it will not be scientifically detectable, and will not be included in scientific theories, and so there can be no conflict with science about them. To the extent that they are physical they can evolve via divinely-created 'laws of nature' designed for the purpose.


If Life and Mind Evolved, What of Free Will (FW) and Moral Choice?
The Evolutionary Significance of Consciousness:  MORAL BEINGS AND PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY

 Moral activity could begin only upon the emergence of the first true 'moral being' - a being possessing sufficient intelligence and foresight to understand the consequences of its actions, equipped with a moral sense to know the difference between good and evil actions, and  endowed with the free will to choose between the two.Clearly there can be no moral choice in a being lacking consciousness and self-consciousness. It therefore behooves us to ask where along the evolutionary chain the phenomenon of consciousness and self-consciousness arose, and then when there arose a moral consciousness.
This is a question under active investigation today, but it already occupied the early scientific pioneeers of evolutionary theory. As the eminent evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky writes, self awareness is quite possibly unique to human beings:
"Self-awareness is, then, one of the fundamental, possibly the most fundamental characteristic of the human species. This characteristic is an evolutionary novelty: the biological species from which mankind has descended had only rudiments of self-awareness, or perhaps lacked it altogether."
    “In point of fact, self-awareness is the most immediate and incontrovertible of all realities. Without doubt, the human mind sets our species apart from nonhuman animals” [Theodosius Dobzhansky et al 1977, p. 453]
 If self-awareness arose only in the human humans, or possibly is present in a rudimentary form in 'the species from which mankind has descended',  moral consciousness could only have arisen in one of these two species.  Although not everyone might agree on definitions of intelligence, consciousness, morality and so on, certainly no-one would consider any animal - even the highest ape - as morally responsible for its actions . This is because no species other than man seems to posses the requisite combination of free will, intelligence, and analytic ability which can allow us to consider their actions as freely chosen.      According to Darwin - in agreement with earlier writers:  "of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."
Julian Huxley saw the emergence of moral consciousness as a turning point in the evolutionary process itself: "It is only through social evolution that the world-stuff can now realize radically new possibilities. Mechanical interaction and natural selection still operate, but have become of secondary importance. For good or evil, the mechanism of evolution has in the main been transferred onto the social or conscious level...The slow methods of variation and heredity are outstripped by the speedier processes of acquiring and transmitting experience...And in so far as the mechanism of evolution ceases to be blind and automatic and becomes conscious, ethics can be injected into the evolutionary process....it becomes possible to introduce...moral purpose into evolution."
According to Erich Fromm [italics in original]:"....The religious need is rooted in the basic condition of existence of the human species.......the human species can be defined as the primate who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brains a maximum  . This combination.....had never occurred before in animal evolution and constitutes, biologically speaking, a completely new phenomenon. "   Using the terminology of Victor Frankl , one could say that the human being is unique in that it is driven at its most basic level by "the will to meaning". No other member of the evolutionary chain can be so described - and thus man is qualitatively different than his evolutionary forebears.

Meaning and Purpose of life in the universe: from the Human and Divine Perspectives
One could say that until the emergence of man, there was no moral activity on earth, no free willed choice, and thus no true purpose - at least from the point of view of religion - to the existence of the universe. From the perspective of the God of the Bible, until the emergence of morally-responsible free will, all events are either determined or random, and so the universe is purposeless. [See my articles "Free Will" and "And God said: "Let there have been a Big Bang" for an extensive discussion of these points.]
 
A Possible Creation Chronology
After creating the 'initial singularity', big bang, and natural law, Gd could 'sit back and watch'   creation develop along the path it was designed to follow.  Matter would emerge from the initial energy, atoms would be built up from the matter, and stars would form from the atoms.  Planets would assume shape and finally after billions of years of 'waiting', life would emerge somewhere in the universe. Then life could evolve towards greater complexity, and with the emergence of the first moral being, the universe could begin to be considered meaningful, to be working  towards the achievement of some purpose.
For example on Earth, after a few billion more years, after the extinction of the dinosaurs, with the amoeba finally evolved via the ape into the human being, the long wait would be over, and the drama of moral activity could begin.  
See articles "Free Will" and "And God said: "Let there have been a Big Bang" for an extensive discussion of these points.

The Importance of Mind in the Universe
Following Wigner andVonNeumann and others who speculated that consciousness is required to effectuate the collapse of the wave function, my article "Free Will" [published in Bohr Hatorah and available on this site] sets out the speculative thesis that since free will is beyond both determinism and quantum randomness, it is uniquely suited to be that active ingredient of consciousness which collapses the wave function; moreso, since it is moral responsibility which is the fundamental philosophical motivation for assuming the existence of free will, that it is morally-responsible free will which underlies the collapse.
I mention there Wheeler's idea that the universe may have emerged into existence due to an act of the consciousness of a being within the universe.[see footnote 6]...mentions that perhaps consciousness was inherent in the universe and humans tapped into it when their brains became sufficiently developed......
ie the creation of the universe begins with the first collapse of the universal wave-function by a free willed moral being [who in the Bible is Adam].

Aside: Note re the age of the universe:
The application of this idea to Genesis, ie the account of the creation of the universe and of Adam is that according to this model, in some sense the universe is only as old as free-willed moral choice.
According to the Torah view that Adam was the first morally-reponsible free willed being, the universe could be said to begin its purposive existence from the point of the emergence of this first moral being, Adam, and this can lead to a discrepancy between the age of the universe as seen by science and by biblical religion [this
The age of the universe can be calculated from different perspectives - and afer all there are known to be 70 facets of torah.

Possible Future Directions for a Scientific Theory of Origins

There may well be some natural mechanism which causes self-organization, and can explain the emergence of the complexity underlying both the galactic and stellar structure in the large and inorganic, and the molecules and cells of our bodies in the small and organic. A natural ‘guiding hand’ to evolution such as this would deepen the seeming teleology of the evolutionary process, and would make the scientific origin theory seem like an account of creation.
This would not be intelligent design by a superior being, but rather a naturalistic process.

Consciousness
The nature of consciousness is a scientific enigma: The inability of scientific theory to account for the evolution of consciousness is a serious lacuna of origin theory, as Sir John Eccles, [ Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963] pointed out in  The Wonder of Being Human 1984,  pages 36-37:
…. nowhere in the laws of physics or in the laws of derivative sciences, chemistry and biology, is there any reference to consciousness or mind….its emergence is not reconcilable with the natural laws as at present understood...
Second, all materialist theories of the mind are in conflict with biological evolution. Since they all (panpsychists, epiphenomenalists, and identy theorists) assert the causal ineffectiveness of consciousness per se, they fail completely to account for the evolutionary expansion of consciousness, which is an undeniable fact. There is first its emergence and then its progressive development with the growing complexity of the brain. Evolutionary theory holds that only those structures and processes that significantly aid in survival are developed in natural selection...
Eccles, John C. and Daniel N. Robinson (1984), The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (New York: The Free Press).

Gregory:  If the brain was developed by Natural Selection, we might well suppose that consciousness has survival value. But for this it must, surely, have causal effects. But what effects could awareness, or consciousness, have? (1977, p. 276, emp. added).
Gregory, Richard L. (1977), “Consciousness,” The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, ed. Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith (Oxford, England: Pergamon), pp. 273-281.

Eccles and Robinson, 1984, p. 17,18:
 We believe that the emergence of consciousness is a skeleton in the closet of orthodox evolutionism.... It remains just as enigmatic as it is to an orthodox evolutionist as long as it is regarded as an exclusively natural process in an exclusively materialist world.

Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles The Self and Its Brain, (1977, p. 129). “the emergence of full consciousness...is indeed one of the greatest of miracles”

Eccles and Robinson (1984, p. 37):
[A]ll materialist theories of the mind are in conflict with biological evolution.... Evolutionary theory holds that only those structures and processes that significantly aid in survival are developed in natural selection. If consciousness is causally impotent, its development cannot be accounted for by evolutionary theory .
A complete theory of evolution must account for the emergence of consciousness. Since consciousness is the most complex phenomenon and of an entirely different qualitative level than any other phenomenon, the theory accounting for it will presumably be far more sophisticated than the present day origin theory, and indeed may be of an entirely different qualitative level.
As consciousness involves elements of self-reference and holism, is the source of subjectivity and crosses the mind-body divide, presumably the theory of it will do so as well. As such the complete origin theory will possibly take on features more reminiscent of some of the underlying themes of the Eden account.

We do not know whether there are mutiple-universes, or areas of the universe with different laws of nature some of which will inevitably permit life to evolve etc.
We do not yet know the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities, we also do not yet know how many planets there are and what conditions are necessary in order to allow for the emergence of life on a planet, and therefore we do not know whether or not it is reasonable that somewhere in the universe – specifically, here on Earth - life should evolve.
We do not yet know everything we need to know about cells, and about the mechanisms whereby evolution takes place, etc, and so we do not know how to compute the relevant probabilities of for example cellular life emerging from the inanimate mineral world.
We also do not know yet enough about chaos and attractors,  complexity, quantum gravity etc and their possible role in guiding evolutionary processes, and other possible natural mechanisms which would do so, let alone  the possible role of consciousness about which we know virtually nothing, in the emergence of life and of humanity - especially if there was a primordial consciousness [see more on this below].
Evolutionary theory is a MODEL, an ATTEMPT to find a naturalistic answer, a mechanism which perhaps could have given rise to what we see about us. It is simply too early to determine whether or not the laws of nature actually permit the emergence of life, and of humanity; and it is certainly premature to discuss whether or not there is some way we could determine if it actually happened in that way.
For the moment, so far, the big bang and evolutionary model (or theory) is the best naturalistic theory of the emergence of humanity.  
 
Emergent Mind
If a thought is resident in/associated to the brain because it is a complex organism of interacting elements (see the interesting example in Hofstadter, 'The Ant Fugue'), then other such networks could conceivably support thought. For example, society, or the collective of intelligent activity in the universe, or the universe as a whole. Perhaps there is such a cosmic mind, and we are its neurons, as unaware of the Mind as our neurons are of us.
Such a Mind could have helped shape the universe in which it arose, or perhaps the element of thought which was present at the initial stages was itself responsible in some way for the big bang and the design of the laws of nature.  

Possible Future Convergence of Spirituality/Religion and Science
The most complex entity we know is the human brain, and the highest-level interaction/phenomenon is consciousness. To many people it seems unlikely that consciousness can arise at some late stage in the universe’s existence without it having been present at its inception. All the more so regarding free-willed consciousness; it seems to many of those who believe in the existence of this phenomenon that it cannot have evolved from any non-free-willed-conscious prior state. And so that there must have been some aspect of free-willed consciousness existent at the outset: indeed the very emergence into existence of the universe is itself a non-causal event of the same type as are free-willed choices.
Free willed consciousness by its very nature is inherent “intelligent” and motivated, a higher-level process. As such, if it was present at the inception of the universe, it is possible that it played some role in the future development of that universe. Therefore, the directedness that lies at the root of free-willed conscious choice should be factored in to the equation of evolution as a teleological agent. An evolutionary process involving such an agent in some way would likely show a greater tendency to the emergence of complexity, life, intelligence, and consciousness than would a purely random process driven by a universe devoid of all consciousness.

If there was indeed Mind operating at a fundamental level in this way, mind will be considered to have otherwise-unexpected effects.

Intelligent Design (ID)
First of all, ID does not mean the conclusion that it is necesary to involve the existence of God in order to explain the emergence of humanity.
A possible scenario of the fuure is that scientific theory will teach that Mind is central to the universe.and perhaps also the emergence of the universe into physical reality. Mind needs to be taken more into account in how the big bang emerged, and how it evolved into the universe of today; and mind would plays a central role in.evolutionary mechanisms. Consiousness was present in the universe from the outset, and our consciousness is derived from that. Perhaps our brain is the antenna which alows us to be conscious, by tapping in to the universal consciousness.  
At some point it may then become part of the scientific pursuit to investigate the effect of mind on the body, unexpected effects during meditation or prayer, group effect of mind concentration, the effect of mind after the body dies, the group effect of all these after-death mind-residuals, the effect of that which was the prescursor to mind on the origin of the universe, temporal transcendence of this Mind so that its eventual emergence can effectuate the big bang (like Wheeler etc), 'communication' between this mind and human minds. These topics, traditionally associated with spirituality and religion would become firmly scientific, thereby effectuating some 'convergence' of science, spirituality and religion.

Conclusion
The present theory of evolution/big bang is a very convincing one under the assumption that there is neither a God, nor directedness to evolution. The Biblical creation account (as understood non-slavishly-literally) is on the other hand a fitting one for a universe created by a creator desiring the operation of free-willed moral choice.
The two perspectives do not conflict, they supplement each other, and there are also major points of overlap. When consciousness - and more so, free will - is finally scientifically understood, the resulting future scientific theory of origins and the religious/biblical view of origins will possibly merge even more.

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