Intelligent Design or Inescapable Disease

Seems like everywhere you look these days the hot topic is ID. Should it be taught in public schools? Is investigating and writing about it enough to disqualify a professor from being granted tenure? The list of questions and controversies goes on and on.

It sure seems as though those who want to believe in Creation and have a desire for others to believe the same have changed tactics. After years of confronting evolution head-on, marching under the banner of the Creator, it at least appears they have opted for a different strategy. On the battlefield it would be called a flanking maneuver. The thinking goes like this: "since we have not succeeded in getting Creation back in the classroom, lets lower our sights a little and do an end-run under the cover of Intelligent Design. We haven't used the "C" word and it is at least outwardly impersonal. Maybe, just maybe, we can pull it off. Of course, it could just happen that the other side isn't as unobservant as we hope and our maneuver fails."

But as I ponder on this weighty subject, I fear promoters of Intelligent Design have at least in part succumbed to the Inescapable Disease. You know, the one Paul described in Romans 1. The one we all struggle against, creating God in our image. Promoters of ID look at nature and, rightfully, see overwhelming indications of design which implies a designer. So far, so good.

But who is the designer? The ID designer is one all sorts of people could relate to: deists, pantheists, agnostics. Certainly the designer is not required to have invisible attributes or a divine nature, things that according to Paul are clearly seen in the things He has made. When we make the designer less than God, what have we done? We have suppressed the truth, we have failed to honor him as God, we have failed to give thanks to him, we have become futile in our thinking with darkened hearts. In short, we have given in to the Inescapable Disease of sin which encourages compromise and watering down the truth. Worst of all, we have made the designer one like us, infinite light years short of the glorious and majestic Creator of all things, and no more than an idol.

And when we reach that point, where the best we can define is some designer with sufficient intelligence to plan all we can observe, where is our hope? As Paul asked a few chapters later, "Who will save me from this body of death?" If the Intelligent Designer is only capable of making things that decay, rust, rot, get sick and die, where is the hope that that Designer is the answer to Paul's question?

We need a Creator, as revealed to us in both natural and special revelation, who has given us value, purpose, meaning, and a hope for the future in his Son, the God-man. Only in the eternal Word by whom and for whom the worlds were created do we find adequate answers to the ultimate questions of life. And death. And what comes after.