Who Is the Intelligent Designer?

I would like to return again to defining intelligent design. I mentioned “things in the universe which exhibit a kind of complexity... as though a rational agent had designed it.” So what is a rational agent that could design the world?


Is this agent personal or impersonal? I am thinking of an image which as I recall was attributed to Nietzsche: when men were “primitive,” we were subject to all kinds of impersonal dangers like floods and earthquakes and hurricanes, and there was little we could do about them; we invented the idea of a personal God in order to be able to plead with Him and have a hope of being heard.


An impersonal rational agent seems hardly any different than saying that things evolved by chance, but I think there is a fine distinction which leaves this as an option. Chance is chance, things are as they are but they could have just as easily been otherwise. An impersonal rational agent consists of orderly (rational) rules and directives such that things will happen according to these rules. The design we see is a result of the rules of existence interplaying in such a way that it is orderly. Yet even this formulation of rules seems to be a product of design.


This leads to another consideration. Is the rational agent final? Is the agent the ultimate, transcendental agent which is because it is, or is there another agent that created the first in the same way the first created us? (I mean creation loosely, that it is responsible for our design). Whatever the answer is, the same questions we ask of our creator could be plied in the same way toward the one who created him, or the one who created him, until we find the final cause.


If our immediate creator is a personal agent, we can further ask the question of whether or not there are one or many distinct beings. Not only could there be one agent who created another, but the one may have created many.


In the end it becomes clear that there are a lot of things we could reason about the intelligent designer and not many things we can reason with certainty. I would like to take a step back and consider by what means we can know anything. So far I have been starting with information that is immediately clear to us or that we observe, and using our own reason try to deduce more. We can also learn by being told by one who knows. This latter option is certainly easier, and hopefully more reliable. It seems good, then, to exhaust the possibility of direct information before we resort to unaided reason.