Just How Intelligent is the Designer?

For the next few posts the emphasis will be on the things that I find to be the biggest barriers to belief in the God of conservative protestant Christianity.  There are other forms of Christianity that portray God differently but they will be for later.  For these posts God will be the one most people think of when they think of the Bible.
This time I'm musing on the idea of Intelligent Design.
The Intelligent Design (ID) Movement is a broad church. It has cousins within Christianity but I'll be rambling about those later.
Proponents of ID believe that "Life, the Universe and Everything" is just too complex to have come about all by itself. It must, they say, be the product of an Intelligence. Some, including the Christians, go further and say that the Designer had a Purpose for Everything and still others ascribe to the Designer a Personality that looks remarkably like one of us -only bigger.
Take the next step and suggest that we can communicate with this Intelligent person and you get into Religion.
The first thing you have to wonder is why you need a Designer.
Part of the answer to that one is the way people seem to need to find a beginning to the Universe. They seem to get very uncomfortable with the idea that the Universe just IS. Newton is partly to blame. His laws of Motion had the Universe pinned down as being like a giant machine - almost like a the clockwork of a watch. And a watch needs a watchmaker. Since a watch is nothing like as complex as the Universe it follows that the Universe too needed a maker.
In one of Terry Pratchett's books he says that in the beginning there was nothing and then nothing exploded.
And that's what people don't like. How can Nothing explode and become Everything - no matter how Big the Bang was?
So there was a Designer or a Creator.
But where did the Creator come from?
Simple He (it's always He in Christian circles) - He Just WAS.
Now Carl Sagan used to ask. "Why add the extra step?" If you can get your head around a Creator who always just WAS why not a Universe that always WAS?
If the Designer wasn't Designed why was the Universe?
Anyway - lets' add the extra step just to see where it gets us.
Let's assume that there was or is an Intelligent Designer.
Looking at the result you may be tempted to ask, "How intelligent was the Designer?"
And as with so many things in the metaphysical realm, the answer depends a lot on your point of view.
Carl Sagan in the seventies and Brian Cox in the present enthuse over the elegance of the Laws of Physics. The Universe operates according to a set of predictable and, as far as we can see, unfailing "rules". If it didn't there would be no stars or planets - not even any atoms to make them with.
So you might conclude that there must have been a Designer who first drew up the rules.
Only it doesn't follow. The Universe is the way it is because of the Laws of Physics but equally the Laws of Physics are what they are because the Universe is the way it is. If the laws of Physics were different there may still be a Universe. It would be a lot different from the one we've got and we probably wouldn't be here to notice anyway.
So a Designer isn't actually necessary. But that doesn't prove that there isn't one. It only takes away the claim that there had to be a Designer.
The next idea is the Design has purpose.
In a way this another reading back from ourselves into the Universe. We like to have a purpose for our individual and corporate lives. Ideally we'd like everyone to share our ideas of the purpose of human existence. But that doesn't happen, partly because we really don't understand each other well enough to work out what each of us wants and partly because we really do all want something different.
So how do we get some order into it all and stop each single person pursuing their own way.
One way is to evoke the Designer and His Purpose.
So is there evidence of purpose in the Universe?
Again it depends on how you look at it. You could say that we humans are part of an unbelievably long story that started way before we came on the scene and that will continue long after our species has bowed its way off the Stage. Now that viewpoint doesn't get us far. In the unimaginably vast spaces of time that the Universe has existed and will go existing, our time as a species has been so short that we couldn't even begin to comprehend the Purpose of the Universe, which really makes it impossible to say if there is one or not.
Even if there was a Designer did He just wind it all up and leave it to run? Has He forgotten all about it?
Not quite good enough.
We have to take the idea a bit further - bring it a bit closer to home.
The Designer did have a purpose and that purpose was the emergence and eventual triumph of the human race.
So far so good.
Except that now the Design starts to look a little frayed at the edges. Humans aren't really very well designed for dominion over the Universe. We are fragile and short lived, prone to disease and subject to injury, even when we aren't killing each other and ourselves.
Could it be that the Designer made a bad job? Of course that's possible but any sort of Being that stands outside of Time and the Universe ought to be the kind of Being that doesn't make mistakes.
Enter the Fall of Man.
The Designer and His Design were Perfect. But there were rules to living in the Perfect Design and humans broke them. When they broke the Rules they also broke the Design.
But now we've come to the God of conventional Christianity and I promised to leave Him or Her for another post.

Do I miss my Christian Faith?

I used to have a Christian faith. It started as a fairly conventional low-church Anglican belief, but it got complicated when I bumped into the Charismatics, the Pentecostals and finally some Fundamentalists. Up until then I was quite happy to believe in God as a remote being, almost unimaginably remote, who didn't so much respond to prayer as allow prayer to change our thinking about things.
But the Charismatics had other ideas. They were all for triumphing over circumstances, using the name of Jesus as a sort of assault tank. Adversity, you see, is the work of the Devil and the Devil must give way to the name of Jesus. Illness will be healed, finances will be sorted and customers will flock to my business.
OK that's not all Charismatics, just the triumphalists and the prosperity gospellers, but the whole movement was geared up to getting human beings to exercise the supernatural power of God.
The only problem was that it didn't work. There were no answers to prayers - not even the answer 'no' - just a deafening silence. What really hurt was the way it was my fault. I wasn't listening. I didn't have enough faith. Think back to the last thing God asked you to do and have you done it? Is there an unconfessed sin between you and God?
Then there were the fundamentalists, the Biblical literalists who insisted that God really did create the universe in six days and that it all happened a bare six thousand years ago. Some of them even had a date in October. Not that such a belief is harmful in itself. If people want to think that a myth like the story in the book of Genesis is the literal truth then that is their choice.
But it has two side effects.
The first is that they take every other myth in the book they call the Word of God to be the absolute truth as well. More of that in another post.
The other is that they reduce any concept of God to the anthropomorphic being in the sky that these early myths portray. God is tidy and contained - tamed and the universe shrinks. Instead of being unimaginably vast and unimaginably old, mysterious, beautiful and dangerous, it becomes nothing but a symbol for God.
And not a symbol for a  being so different that even to say that God 'exists' is an unbearable strain on language - no - this God is merely a craftsman who can be contained within the pages of book.
The God they were giving me was a God invented by human beings and when the universe proved too vast for such a tiny God, they wanted to shrink the universe.
The late Carl Sagan wrote in A Pale Blue Dot, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better then we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said; grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even bigger than we dreamed.'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My God is a little god and I want him to stay that way.'"