One reason for the vigor of my review is rooted in my conviction that Paley did far more damage to nineteenth–century Christianity than Friedrich Nietzsche ever managed to do to twentieth–century religion. Design is the founding axiom of Deist religion; and as Darwin’s own life attests, nothing more rapidly congeals into atheism (or agnosticism) than Deism (see James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed for an account of this declension).
...
But for me the greatest difference between Thomas Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument and any and all arguments from design comes from what all the advocates of design admit: that the candidate for the Intelligent Designer could be, at least theoretically, just about any supra–human intelligent manipulator of complex artifacts, from outer–space aliens to Al Gore’s Mama Gaia.
...
Now Prof. Johnson’s concession of microevolution to materialist Darwinism while cordoning off macro evolution as a redoubt of Intelligent Design is either Creation “Science” on the installment plan, or (more likely) Deism put under a stroboscope. If one must conceive of the universe as an artifact (and how odd that materialist Darwinians and Intelligent Designers both hold that life is a mechanical artifact), then the idea of a Clockmaker God who winds it all up and then departs the scene has a certain plausibility, I suppose. But the idea that God swooshed down from heaven 3.5 billion years ago to toggle some organic–soup chemicals into self–replicating molecules and thereafter, as occasion warranted, had to intervene to jump–start new species is, quite literally, incredible. Prof. Johnson’s God is not even the recessive Clockmaker God of the Deists. Rather, his God is one who, with disconcerting inconsistency, intervenes every now and again. As I say, Deism under a stroboscope.