Some oppose a design conception of the cosmos only because they consider bizarre a “Designer” of the cosmos. This way they show to have an anthropomorphic, wrong idea of the Designer. So I think it is useful to dedicate a post to counter the error of anthropomorphism.
Specifically anthropomorphism is the error of attributing to God the human form and properties. On the contrary, the supreme Being not only transcends any human, even transcends any specific particular “being”, even transcends any “form” whatsoever.
There is no reason why one should conceive the universal Intelligence, symbolically called “Designer”, from which the cosmos fully gets its existence and design, as something limited by a form, human or whatever.
To my knowledge, in English, the suffix “er”, when applied to a verb or noun, transforms it into the cause of the verb / noun. Nowhere it is said that this X-er cause must be a specific “being”, let alone a “human”, let alone an “individual”.
So, when we apply the “er” operator to the verb / noun “design” we get the cause of the design, its intelligent cause. When the design is the entire universe, then its intelligent cause is the supreme Being itself, and for this reason, we call it “Design-er” (with the uppercase “D”).
Unfortunately not only some evolutionists / atheists are anthropomorphist. Also some Neo-Thomists oppose ID for similar reasons. For example, Neo-Thomist philosopher Edwar Feser in his post about Thomism versus the design argument quotes the following passage from Christopher F. J. Martin:
The argument from design had its heyday between the time of Newton and the time of Darwin, say, a time in which most people apparently came to see the world as a minutely designed piece of craftsmanship, like a clock. It is no coincidence that the most famous presentation of the argument from design actually compares the world to a clock: it is known by the name of Paley’s watch… The Being whose existence is revealed to us by the argument from design is not God but the Great Architect of the Deists and Freemasons, an impostor disguised as God, a stern, kindly, and immensely clever old English gentleman, equipped with apron, trowel, square and compasses. Blake has a famous picture of this figure to be seen on the walls of a thousand student bedrooms during the nineteen-seventies: the strong wind which is apparently blowing in the picture has blown away the apron, trowel and set-square but left him his beard and compasses. Ironies of history have meant that this picture of Blake’s is often taken to be a picture of God the Creator, while in fact Blake drew it as a picture of Urizen, a being who shares some of the attributes of the Great Architect and some of those of Satan. The Great Architect is not God because he is just someone like us but a lot older, cleverer and more skilful. He decides what he wants to do and therefore sets about doing the things he needs to do to achieve it. God is not like that. (C. F. J. Martin, “Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations”, pp. 180-182)
I cited it in extenso because it is exemplar of an anti-ID position based on the equivoque of anthropomorphism. Feser’s endorsement and the above Martin’s affirmations are particularly meaningful because allow us to understand one of the reasons why some modern Neo-Thomist thinkers hate so much Intelligent Design to even go preferring Darwinism. In short they wrongly argue something like this: Intelligent Design recalls a Designer, a Designer recalls the Great Architect, the Great Architect recalls Masonry, Masonry recalls a position enemy of Catholicism. Ergo a Neo-Thomist should be contra Intelligent Design in principle.
I have not at all lost hope that Neo-Thomists and IDers (or at least, some of them) could finally arrive to an agreement in the future. For this motive I reply without the least intention of polemics, rather only to defend the truth (as I always try to honestly do). To the goal I have to clear some serious misunderstandings in the above Martin’s quote, and explain why their reasoning is not correct from several points of view.
(1) Whoever has studied the traditions, knows that the Great Architect of Masonry is not at all “an impostor disguised as God, a stern, kindly, and immensely clever old English gentleman… someone like us but a lot older, cleverer and more skilful”, as Martin believes. The Great Architect is a symbol of the universal Intellect, the Spirit of the universal Construction, the supreme Being. An orthodox Freemason is not at all Deist, and the correct metaphysical conception of the Great Architect is infinitely distant from any anthropomorphism.
(2) The conception of a “divine Constructor” is shared by all orthodox traditions (then, not only Masonry). For example, in Hinduism they call it “Wishwakarma” = “the Great Carpenter”. In Islam the very name “Allah” means also “the Great Architect” (even some letters of the term are symbolically linked to the universal design tools, square and compass). In Christianity and Judaism, the Bible is filled with design conceptions and, last but not least, Jesus, the “son of God”, was also “the son of the carpenter” and in turn a “carpenter” himself. Jesus was effectively and symbolically identified to the Great Carpenter of the cosmos, his “Father”. This fundamental characteristic of Jesus is a thing that some Christians tend to easily forget, nevertheless, for who knows that all in the life and mission of a divine descent (as Jesus was) is symbolic and has to be universalized, that attribute has meaning in connection with a design worldview, as Christianity is.
(3) About the ludicrous attempt by Martin of even equating the Great Designer / Architect with Satan, I have only to suggest him to search for Satan where he actually is, surely very far from any design conception of the world.
(4) Whatever have been the historical and political conflicts between some representatives of Masonry and Catholicism, these two traditions, in their roots, at different levels, and under different symbolic forms and expressions, share the identical metaphysical background of the supreme Being. The former underlines more its aspect of Designer while maybe the latter more other aspects, nevertheless the ultimate metaphysics is unique. (In a previous UD post myself dealt with the equivalence Being = Designer, and there I inserted indeed the Blake’s picture that scandalizes so much Martin and his likes).
At the very end, in its extreme generality, anthropomorphism is to attribute to the infinite Being the limits and forms of the infinitesimal beings. Therefore whoever IDer tries to assume a design worldview of the cosmos should avoid this error in all its forms, because the Great Designer of the universe is such unlimited Being. This way the design conception of the cosmos, and its Designer, can be defended from whoever equivocally uses the anthropomorphic pretest to badly deny the former and the latter.