Intelligent design does NOT have to involve God, although theists can choose to place the intelligence in a deity.
The driving force behind the opposition to rational debate and discussion of intelligent design theory is a pervasive undercurrent of Anti-theism, or a need by some people to have there NOT be a God.
The mere suggestion that there may be a God, even alluding to His existence and involvement with intelligent design theory, sets a transcendent foundational framework for civilized moral human behavior that declares a right and a wrong way of living and interacting with others.
The driving force behind the opposition to rational debate and discussion of intelligent design theory is a pervasive undercurrent of Anti-theism, or a need by some people to have there NOT be a God.
The mere suggestion that there may be a God, even alluding to His existence and involvement with intelligent design theory, sets a transcendent foundational framework for civilized moral human behavior that declares a right and a wrong way of living and interacting with others.
I want a straight answer, J. Semper Paratus: Are you accusing me of immorality? Please be specific as to what aspects of my personality or sexual or financial, etc. practices you find immoral.
For more than a century, science attempted to explain all human behaviour as the subrational product of unbending chemical, genetic, or environmental forces. The spiritual side of human nature was ignored, if not denied outright.
This rigid scientific materialism infected all other areas of human knowledge, laying the foundations for much of modern psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Yet today new developments in biology, physics, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural.
In the end, that's what it's all about. And you will know them by what they do.
What makes Intelligent Design so shaky as a theory isn't that it requires a deitic or non-deitic intelligence, but that there is no connection between the data and "intelligence". Until someone comes up with a mathematically rigorous algorithm for discerning "intelligence" in data, it is a worthless hypothesis. The very existence of an automobile in now way proves that it is the consequence of intelligent design. There are other unrelated scientific reasons we would probably find any other hypothesis to be statistically improbable, but those reasons are specific to the properties of the automobile which don't necessarily apply to anything else.
I personally am skeptical of ID claims for our universe and existence not because it is not possible that this is the case, but because there is no discernable separation of design or intelligence from everything else as a point of mathematical fact, so it makes anyone who claims to have such things a snake oil peddler or ignoramus.
When you can develop an objective algorithm for discriminating "intelligence" and "design" in an arbitrary set of data, then ID can become a solid theory. Since I can tell you right now this is mathematically impossible, you are left with demonstrating the existence of a Creator that is capable of what the ID theorists claim as that is the only avenue to theory-hood available to ID theorists.
The 'nameless intelligent designer'(NID). I've gotten so used to calling the great IAM, God.