So you are saying your engineering research has led you to believe nature can take a lack of information, and order things together giving the appearance of intelligence?
The most sophisticated thing I have seen nature create is crystalline structures, and they don't evidence an increase in information like self-replicating, self-healing, error correcting life does.
Think about this. The universe itself has a memory (what you see in the Hubble Telescope is 12 billion years worth of memory), it has a nervous system (light and radio rays transmitting information), it has local pockets of order (at least the earth, likely more) which form cells. It is a self conscious entity (gravity holds it together). So, there may well be thinking creatures on a cosmic scale.
But of course, I already think nature/God has evolved thinking creatures right here.