Philosophers who favor Aristotle and other ancient views of Nature, see it as more of an organism, while philosophers who favor modern views see Nature more as machine. Intelligent Design theory has come about in the modern age and is usually framed within the modern view that Nature is a machine, and that God or whoever the designers were had to manipulate life, much as an engineer or mechanic has to manipulate the parts of a machine. This causes all sorts of hostile reactions from the first group of philosophers, who reject the idea that living organisms are mere machines.
What's interesting is that the Biblical view straddles the fence. Nature is an organism that God has created, with potential capacities. But she can only exercise these capacities at God's command. God tells her to make light, and she does. He tells her to bring forth life and she does. He tells living organisms to be fruitful and multiply, and they obey.
So on the Biblical view, it sounds as if Nature has the ability to evolve new living organisms, but only at God's command. Once he tells her to make new phyla, she will.
Does God's command include the information that Nature needs to produce new organisms? Or is the information already inherent in Nature, waiting for God's command to put it to new use?
In his book,
Darwin Devolves, Professor Michael Behe mentions that Eugene Koonin thought the first bacteria and archaea already contained all the different kinds of genes that all organisms use up to the present day. If so, then it sounds like the information was already present, just waiting for God's command to bring forth new forms of life.
So is teleology intrinsic or extrinsic? Yes.
