Thoughts in a Haystack

It's never a surprise when any of the Discovery (sic) Institute drones admit that "The Designer" they are going on about is really God, though it's important to document the dishonesty. David Klinghoffer is the latest, though he does still waive a fig leaf in front of God's constitutional "naughty bits."

In the evolution debate, a common charge against intelligent design is that it insults God by implying He set up His world so poorly that it requires constant modifications and inference to keep things going along the track He had in mind to begin with. You could make the same criticism of any alleged miracle -- that is, any interference by a transcendent creator or designer in the course of natural or human history.

... I've been seeking a compelling positive reason that God would have -- as He or some designer seems to have done -- devised natural laws that are not sufficient by themselves to account for the course that life's history has taken.

... Is it in any way a "slight to God" to think His laws are insufficient to get all the work of creation done? If so, why? If not, why not?

Wielding that "some designer" the way another dissembler once used "But it would be wrong," cannot paper over the fact that it is the existence of a transcendent being performing miracles that Intelligent Design Creationists like Klinghoffer are proposing to teach as science. One anonymous commenter made a nice theological response to Klinghoffer's question:

Intelligent design creationism is an insult to God, because Johnson and its other creators deliberately left God out of the picture. In an effort to get around the US Supreme Court 1987 decision prohibiting the teaching of "creation science" in public schools because it is blatantly obviously religion, Johnson et al took God and Genesis and Adam and Eve and Noah and all the good parts out of the creation story. They proposed an anonymous invisible supernatural "intelligent designer," publicly denying for years that it was God. They created another creator - another God! A Vatican theologian has stated that this is technically heresy - an insult to God. How any serious creationist could support intelligent design creationism is a mystery.

It will be interesting (in the same sense as rubbernecking a fender bender) to see Klinghoffer expound on the theology of ID.
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