What is the difference between a machine and self awareness arising as an attribute of a machine?
How can this happen?
Was it God's will?
Was it God's design that the machinery of the universe eventually give rise to living aggregates of machine and non-machine?
Intelligent design?

Yes

Let us begin to understand "in our own way each".

Ok, to me life is nothing like a machine - with machines being cause and effect, and life as organismic's organizing principles providing maximum freedom while maintaining itself through creative initiating acts/functions. So how do organisms maintain themselves, through laws of coherence; identity, value dynamics, oscillation between contrasts, self-law see Life-itself characteristics under Theory of our website. Question, I don't know that much about Intelligent Design thinking, but it sounds like you consider Intelligent Design /God to be machine or machine like. What do you mean by machine?

The Definitions that constrain the model are hierarchical.
To answer your question directly requires a reverse hierarchical iteration descending inwardly toward the primal machine, from the complex to the simple.

The RMCM defines a Machine as : Any given aggregate of mechanisms that implement a mechanism.

The RMCM defines a Mechanism as : Any given aggregate of levers that implement a lever.

The RMCM defines a Lever as : Any given Chase bound to two or three fulcrums.

Clearly, the above can be seen to be confined to the realm of the inorganic.

All machines are capable of acquiring and expressing.

The Car acquires gasoline from the gas tank and expresses movement by metabolising the gasoline such that the vertical motion of the pistons are changed to the rotary motion of the tires.

The step up the ladder of complexity occurs when the machine acquires energy to express the movement necessary to acquire more energy.

The RMCM defines a Complex Mechanism as : any given machine that implements its acquisition through its expression and implements its expression through its acquisition.

The secular term for a complex mechanism is - metabolism.

I’d like to go slow. What are our underlying metaphysics assumptions; the most fundamental of assumptions about reality are what is known as metaphysics as you may know. The dominant metaphysical paradigm til now has been the metaphysics of materialism that includes reductionism and mechanism. With life/organisms, they obey different laws of organization and they can't be understood through a materialism/mechanistic view we believe. We’ll explore more on this later. The new metaphysics that we think best fits organism functioning, is process metaphysics of Whitehead and others. It lays out underlying assumptions about reality that allow us to see and recognize holism, creative, generative, oscillations, and value driven processes etc.
What is the difference between a machine and self-awareness arising as an attribute of a machine? How can this happen?
I am not aware of any machine acquiring self-awareness nor am I aware of any such possibility. Thus I believe it cannot happen. Why would you think otherwise?
Under the old understanding of what was thought to be reality, the materialistic view, it seemed everything was a machine. Some things it appeared had self-awareness. Thus we concluded self-aware machines. However in the last two, possibly three, decades research into the nature of life by disciplines such as biophysics has shown the materialistic approach to be hopelessly inadequate when applied to life. Following where the research seemed to be going I defined life as societies of creative organisms. Organisms are self-aware. Where you perceive self-awareness you perceive an organism, not a machine. Comparing how they are organized to function, machines are organized to function by force, i.e, cause and effect. In living organisms there is no force cause and effect. They are organized to function by internal and external values, even in the bodies, the living cells are working by mutual values. Ok. there we are for now.

Hello, I am pleased to meet you.

In the history of software development, programming languages evolved to handle increasingly sophisticated problems. early on of course they used punch cards to program those monstrous machines. The punch cards manipulated attributes of the computer machinery such as setting gate values to 0's or 1's and implementing the Boolean structures true and false - This type of programming became know as machine language programming. As computer technology improved - faster smaller - and acquired the capacity to store binary data on tape, a new language emerged to manipulate "groups" of gates or binary digits- This language was called assembler. It was a very simple language and interestingly was bound to the machine it was being used on. This language had the capacity to group small sets of sequential instructions syntactically. Over time new languages emerged to provide evermore sophisticated intruction groups through syntax. This perpetual augmenting of syntax began to resemble less the machine and more the person writing it. This phenomenon was described in software development as moving away from the machine.

In the above I have alluded to behavior. The behavior of the machines and the behavior of the people using them.

Let us consider a completely different behavior.

Consider oxidation - binding oxygen to another molecule. Is this chemical reaction a machine or a mechanism? The RMCM is indifferent to encapsulations like system or process.

According to The RMCM if all that moves is light, force, or mass, then it is a mechanism.
If on the other hand the mechanisms behavior directly causes movement in another mechanism, then The RMCM defines it as a machine.

Life begins to emerge when the waste produced by that machine is fuel for another machine, and like wise the fuel used by the fist machine is the waste from the other machine.

This proto-symbiosis hides all the attributes of self awareness. They lie Inexpressed. The scope and extense of the machines is too primitive and too simple.

Yes, I've been programming professionally since 1956 and I'm well aware of all you've just said here.

According to The RMCM if all that moves is light, force, or mass, then it is a mechanism. In the RMCM realilty you may make this declaration, but in more general realities it would not be tru.and Life begins to emerge when the waste produced by that machine is fuel for another machine, and like wise the fuel used by the fist machine is the waste from the other machine. THis is so wide a field of how life begins that it looks to me like plain foolishness. Everything I know based on modern research in biophysics would be outraged by such a thought. I guess we've come to an impass as RMCM ideas seem to relate very little to anything about which we are trying to explore. If I can be of any help to you learning more relevant theories of what life is about, I would be glad to work with you. Such relevant theories are not models or wild ass guesses, but genuine scientific well grounded theories. I applaud your creative intentions, but where is the meaning?

As I became frustrated with coding and Booch's attributes of complex systems, I had an epiphany. There are no Causal Constraints on software.
So what would be a causal constraint?
Impossible to determine given our collective failure to define cause effect form and function. Sure we use them all the time and for every purpose under the sun.
So just what are they really?
This was circa late 2003.
I reflected and prayed on it for a year or a little less, and ...

Cause is difference opened.
Effect is difference closed.
Function is a zero voulume container.
Form is any given bound aggreggate of function.