...while there is random selection there is not random results.
Indeed. That's why Darwin realized that random variation needed to be supplemented with natural selection. The macro-environment 'decides' which random variations survive and which don't. But, again, there's a large element of chance in that, too, since otherwise very fit organisms occasionally have the bad luck to live at a time when, say, a 6-mile-wide asteroid hits their home planet. That sort of thing.
There are zillions of things that have to go just right from the macro the micro in order for creatures such as ourselves to even exist.
If 'zillions' means 'a whole lot' (grin), I agree completely.
But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order.
This I don't quite agree with. Randomness is not incompatible with order. The periodic table of the elements shows how beautifully ordered our cosmos is from the bottom up. There are these quite distinct steps from the simplest elements up to the most complicated stable elements and beyond, each step corresponding to the presence of one additional proton in the nucleus. That's order. And, yet, when radiation impinges on an element, it's impossible to predict with certainty whether an electron will jump up to a higher energy level and then jump back down, radiating a photon of energy in the process. The best that we can do is predict the probability of such a transition (using the rules of quantum mechanics, which have to this day never failed to work). From the lowest sub-atomic level that we currently have access to on up, randomness and order go hand-in-hand.
The mistake that many make, it seems to me, is believing that, without a conscious director, nature is incapable of producing order. This conflicts with my own view of the astonishing fecundity of the physical.
many often forget or fail to understand that order and disorder can be simply a matter of scale.
a large sample of "randomly" moving molecules produces a statistically predicatable order as an aggregate body.
large samples of such large samples - themselves orderly - can in the aggregate display "random" behavior and interaction.
The mistake that many make, it seems to me, is believing that, without a conscious director, nature is incapable of producing order. This conflicts with my own view of the astonishing fecundity of the physical.
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imho this is not a quite correct formulation because thinking conceives events as by cause and effect.
Indeed one reason for the religious upsurge in recent years comes from the confluence of Genesis and Physics. In both instances there is an uncaused first cause. In genesis the Uncaused first caused is God. In Physics the uncaused first cause is the whatever it was that caused the big bang.
In both cases the uncaused first cause is outside of nature as we know it.