I don't have a problem with the basic concept of "intelligent design". But the concept of the intelligent designer as the omnipotent humanoid God of the Bible is intellectually indefensible. And gets us nowhere, since it only leads back to the question of who designed the designer? However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if much of our world and/or solar system is the science project of some more advanced being. After all, we're probably no more than a couple hundred years away from being able to design and plant life to populate and evolve on some other planet of our choice, say Mars, for example.
By saying that God is eternal we mean that in essence, life, and action He is altogether beyond temporal limits and relations. He has neither beginning, nor end, nor duration by way of sequence or succession of moments. There is no past or future for God -- but only an eternal present. If we say that He was or that He acted, or that He will be or will act, we mean in strictness that He is or that He acts; and this truth is well expressed by Christ when He says (John, viii, 58-A.V.): "Before Abraham was, I am." Eternity, therefore, as predicated of God, does not mean indefinite duration in time -- a meaning in which the term is sometimes used in other connections -- but it means the total exclusion of the finiteness which time implies. We are obliged to use negative language in describing it, but in itself eternity is a positive perfection, and as such may be best defined in the words of Boethius as being "interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio," i.e. possession in full entirety and perfection of life without beginning, end, or succession.
The eternity of God is a corollary from His self-existence and infinity. Time being a measure of finite existence, the infinite must transcend it. God, it is true, coexists with time, as He coexists with creatures, but He does not exist in time, so as to be subject to temporal relations: His self-existence is timeless. Yet the positive perfection expressed by duration as such, i.e. persistence and permanence of being, belongs to God and is truly predicated of Him, as when He is spoken of, for example, as "Him that is, and that was and that is to come" (Apoc., i, 4); but the strictly temporal connotation of such predicates must always be corrected by recalling the true notion of eternity.