If not God, who was the Intelligent Designer?

Question

I.D. asserts that the complexity in the natural world indicates design, but proponents usually stop short of actually naming it "the work of God." Instead, they say the traditional god of any particular religion is only a "candidate" for the position of designer.

What are the other possible candidates? Are they being cryptic?

My candidate is the advanced alien life forms that designed the planet. Any others?

Answer 1

There was no "personality" behind creation. That is a myth.
If IDers claim that everything complex needs a creator, then they have to truthfully answer the question "who created the creator." They can't, because it's foolish.
Science is working on the answers to the questions of our origins. Just because they don't have the answers yet, it doesn't mean we should make stuff up.

Answer 2

A name would be meaningless. The "designer" would have to be an extremely advanced super-being to have been able to make things turn out as organized as they have from a starting point so long ago. Anything of that nature would effectively have to be a "god" from our point of view.

And we are only talking about one "designer" so far, not a team. The debate could be whether a being at that level would need help with the design or could do it all himself. But it's not. It's just about how complex the world really is and how it could have become that way. The scientist says, "I'm not done yet," and the ID fan says, "Yes you are!"

So whether he's Jtiq Shvaffod of the Sagittarian Super-cluster or Fawozzhuit Ouinnabomnamoaoua from the 6th Dimension, we'd have to call it "God". (And we STILL wouldn't understand "creation".) To actually state that it IS "God" would be to turn ID back into creationism, and they'd lose what credibility they might have had.

Answer 3

Once upon a time the simple creatures on planet Earth did not know why the sun rose in the morning, so there was a sun god that handled that chore. Why did it rain on some days and not on others? The rain gods are responsible of course.

Now the simple creatures can not explain why the human system is more complicated than they can fathom so there must be some very intelligent being that has designed the system. It is so much easier to say God did it that to actually find out why the human is so incredible. Of course the simple creatures that are less complicated that humans probably think that we are gods too.

Answer 4

the Intelligent Designer?
You, me and every lifeform in the multiverse with any form of consciousness.
The Aneristic Principle is that of APPARENT ORDER; the Eristic Principle is that of APPARENT DISORDER. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper that is the level of distinction making. With our concept making apparatus called "mind" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about-reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the level of concept. We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle. Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other. DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE. The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION. The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered. Reality is the original Rorschach.

Answer 5

The Akkadian Anunnaki or elohim may have contributed to life on Earth. But they too have a God of the gods, an el elohim. God will not need to design anything because He is complete. What did the designing is the Word of God, His thoughts. Because we are bound by the limitations of time, space and causation, we observe the planning, making and disposing. To a God beyond time and space, what we see may just be a blink of an eye.

Answer 6

Your candidate is the focus of the theory known as 'Panspermia.'

ID is an attempt to fit Genesis to the facts, rather than the old tactic of trying to make the facts fit Genesis, that's all... since the Abrahamic religions are the only ones that believe in a monotheistic God (The same one, actually) then pragmatically there is no other candidate.

Answer 7

That would mean you buy in to the idea of the universe being designed. I don't.
They don't say "god" did it because if they did it would be even more transparent as just another name for creation and the genesis story.

Answer 8

Natural selection IS a form of "intelligent designer."

Answer 9

wanna know the truth? i'll tell you. WE are the designers. this is not reality. 99.99% of all matter is empty. .01% of matter actually exists and that .01% is popping in and out of reality. so this is all thought and tons of experiments have shown that our thoughts affect reality. therefore we are the creators.

Answer 10

The same guy who does intelligent falling (because gravity does not exist).