If the latter, the prey might be aware of being eaten alive from inside but unable to move a muscle to do anything about it. This sounds savagely cruel, but, as we shall see, Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This lesson is one of the hardest for humans to learn. We humans have purpose on the brain. The desire to see purpose everywhere is natural in an animal that lives surrounded by machines, works of art, tools and other designed artifacts - an animal whose waking thoughts are dominated by its own goals and aims.
Questions can be simply inappropriate, however heartfelt their framing.
Somewhere between windscreen wipers and tin openers on the one hand, and rocks and the universe on the other, lie living creatures. Living bodies and their organs are objects that, unlike rocks, seem to have purpose written all over them. The apparent purposefulness of living bodies has dominated the reasoning of theologians from Thomas Aquinas to William Paley. For example, Paley, the 18th-century English theologian, asserted that if an object, as comparatively simple as a watch, requires a watchmaker, then far more complicated living creatures must certainly have been divinely designed. The true process that has endowed wings, eyes, beaks, nesting instincts and everything else about life with the strong illusion of purposeful design is now well understood.