What if the Earth system is more complex than a reptile brain? Couldn't it be then comparably functional as well?
First I would start to talk about functionality arising in the Form of a simple "reaction" to special circumstances. On the most primitive level, you have direct physical causation satisfying this Form. Then you have rigid "self-enforcing" chains of physical events forming that "automatically react" following the From; those chains that better enforce their own existence (say, because their interesting effects fit better into diverse longer such chains) would tend to persist and occur more frequently. Gradually, the Form becomes identifiable as "perception/reaction" cycle. Brain neurons are of the same Form! Event patterns would network themselves, with ever more meaningful functionality, etc.
At the moment, I would not explain teleonomy particularly better than the Wikipedia link above and its references.
No. Because the structures are completely different. And there's been no evidence to date at all that the Earth is anything other than a physical system, which has been frozen, attacked by space by debris, left to cook on a high heat and is currently in a semi-stable transition state.
An intentional Earth would look everso slightly different, I think.
Suggesting that the Earth is having earthquakes because we've been bad says a lot more about how narrative logic works than it does about the Earth.
It is simply a matter of scale. Earth's processes do not respond to surface changes linked to global warming because these changes are irrelevant to the scales whereupon earth's processes operate. Surface changes are way, way behind the comma of the physical laws and the material properties that govern tectonic processes involved in generating earthquakes/volcanic activity; they do not matter, period. And hence earth processes do not physically or chemically respond to them, let alone reorganise as result to them.
It's the earth's more sensitive host on the surface, the biosphere, that does respond. Because humans, in our eye-blink of time, are not used to a sudden increase in rates of earth activity, it doesn't make us special, nor does it allow us to assign anthropomorphological features to the earth.
What if the tectonic system (which is probably more ancient than biological life, and is just as unique to Earth for what we know), being more slow and clumsy by orders of magnitude, is set on a critical level within own parameters, and hereby teleonomically ready to receive a signal from the atmosphere or whatever, a signal to let an overhauling hell loose? It would be just another instance of consequential reaction to a special condition...
