Does the universe have a spiritual (or any) teleology?

One suggestion is that if humans have consciousness then it was an inherent design in the universe, or at least some form of intelligence that culminated in human consciousness. The universe appears to be evolving toward it and other complex forms of life. This teleology can be considered spiritual in that it connects everything in the universe and it has a direction and purpose to an ultimate 'something' that was inherent from creation. Ken Wilber said that evolution is that spiritual force inherent to the universe, and that its purpose was to become aware of itself through human consciousness. We are the culmination, at least for now, of the universal purpose.

And yet most involved in evolutionary biology dispute such a teleology. "Some used to believe that evolution was progressive and had a direction that led towards so-called 'higher organisms,' despite a lack of evidence for this viewpoint.^[3] This idea of 'progression' and 'higher organisms' in evolution is now regarded as misleading, with natural selection having no intrinsic direction and organisms selected for either increased or decreased complexity in response to local environmental conditions." ^[4]

So where's the spirituality in that? 

Perhaps we'd have to consider spirituality (and teleology) differently in light of such science? One such spiritual scientist doing so is Evan Thompson, who is trained in Buddhist meditation and is a Buddhist scholar. In this paper he discusses a naturalistic meaning of teleology, one where it “arises from autopoiesis [...] and is none other than the organism’s sense-making. […] Sense-making is not a feature of the autopoietic organization, but rather of the coupling of a concrete autopoietic system and its environment. In other words, teleology is not an intrinsic organizational property, but an emergent relational one that belongs to a concrete autopoietic system interacting with its environment” (391-92).