A Few Prayers to the Intelligent Designer

With all due respect, I don’t know quite how to address you. Sir, madam, your excellency, or chief don’t seem quite serious enough. But I’ve been taught not to throw around the name “God” without a lot of forethought. Worse still, I’m not sure you’re the go-to person when I’m feeling an urgent need to pray. The Intelligent Design people down here are intimating that you just might be, but they seem reluctant to come right out and say so. Maybe they are too vexed by how to get our biology curricula re-written in the light of what this country calls First Amendment issues.

Nevertheless, my Lord’s own intelligent designer put out the word that it was all right to pray to Him a whole lot and that He would not be put off by what or how many times we ask of Him. (By the way, this was his servant’s pronoun, not mine, so please excuse the possible offense.) Since you still seem to be pretty involved in everything everywhere, I’m going to take a chance and petition you on a few things that some of us in these parts are struggling big time with.

Intelligent Designer: Your advocates are making it plain that you must be at the very center of every last skirmish and battle in human history, and that each and every one has had its role to play in your divine (?) governance. And yet, I am grieving over the loss of so many to what very well may be righteous causes around the world. Would you mind being a little clearer about just what the right Holy War is that we should be fighting today? Maybe it’s only me, but I really am pretty confused about who the genuine infidels are among the world’s peoples right now. Some folks are even saying that we are. Surely this cannot be true, but apparently they think otherwise. Perhaps things can proceed in a more orderly fashion if you could see your way to telling them how wrong they are.

Intelligent Designer: I’m terrified over your new design for the Avian flu virus. Yes, it must indeed be a higher purpose that you have in mind for helping these viruses infect us directly, and no longer through the mediation of other precious creatures like birds. Please know that if you do carry this plan out, I will try not to question your motives, but if you are open to negotiation on the matter, could you give us all a sign? We’re ready to talk, repent, teach creationism, or do whatever else you may have in mind, if you would be willing to hold off on this. Our anxiety over it might even provide you one of your most teachable moments. While you’re at it, you could even throw in a few words about the whys and wherefores of malaria, smallpox, polio, the AIDS virus, Huntington’s Chorea, and Tay-Sachs disease.

Intelligent Designer, I am angry with some of my brothers and sisters of the cloth who are calling down your wrath on people who don’t think their way about your Design for things. Let me get to my particular gripe right away. Are you telling me, like they are, that I really do have to give up what I thought I had learned about how you work with living species on this planet? That you leave to nature a lot of the details? I’ll tell you what really hacks me off about this, ID, and then leave you to chasten me if you think I need it. What really hacks me off is that you could be worrying about your own credibility and that, for instance, it is you who is demanding the equal classroom time in our schools and not just your misguided designing subordinates. Believing in you is scientific? Surely you jest. 

Well, Intelligent Designer, I admit that I have been going on and on with just my own stuff, failing in the process to offer you the praise and thanksgiving that I know I am supposed to offer. You do deserve more from me than this. After all, if you have indeed been hovering over human, geological, and astronomical time to keep adjusting and re-adjusting your creation as circumstances have called for, you’ve been treating us a lot better than some of the other so-called Designers that we have heard about. Frustrated over their ineptitude at getting things right the first time, they supposedly left us to stew in our own primordial soup and went on to try out other designs for other universes on other astral planes. Thanks for sticking around and seeing things through with us.