After citing a couple of examples of this trend Klinghoffer argues, correctly, that ID is not inherently religious because it doesn't make any claims about who the designer is or how or when the designer did its work.
He then writes:
If ID were religious in nature, then with what theology or with what faith exactly is it congruent? ID is as much a religious idea as is the cosmology of the Big Bang. Sure, it's more readily reconciled with Judaism or Christianity than you can say of Darwinism or materialism, but that's something different. It also has as much to offer to the unbeliever or the unorthodox searcher as to the confirmed traditional believer. It might even have more.He says this because many people in the contemporary world are experiencing what might be called an existential crisis. They're looking for something beyond themselves to fill the void in their empty lives. Materialism has been tried and found to be utterly inadequate:
It's far from the case that only orthodox religionists have perceived what Alfred Russel Wallace, evolutionary theory's co-founder, called in 1889 the "crushing mental burden" that materialism imposes on modern man. He continued:Modern man is in despair because he realizes that a world that has been purged of the transcendent is spiritually sterile, purposeless, and pointless:
"As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual being capable of indefinite life and perfectibility."
Another British socialist and freethinker of a slightly later generation, George Bernard Shaw, recognized what Darwinism boils down to. Shaw, who held no particular religious beliefs and left instructions at his death that no one should try to erect a cross over his grave, wrote in 1921:
"[Darwinism] seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration."
Yes, the heart sinks. That easily could have been written not in 1921 but today. Even in troubled economic times, we are a vastly wealthy society -- yet one plagued by a hideous, gnawing, wasting sense of unease and dissatisfaction.
Every real solution to this problem of despair assumes a reality beyond our mundane, one-dimensional and material one. How could it not? We are in despair, or fear falling into it -- whether we're religious or otherwise -- over the limitations of our own lives.If there is a designer of some sort "out there" it must be highly intelligent, very powerful, personal, and sufficiently concerned with us to have designed us to be the kind of beings who can experience love and a yearning for transcendence.
The ultimate limit is imposed by death, which we fear as no generation in memory seems to have done despite the overwhelming safety of our existence. In the meantime, while we are still alive, the lack of a sense of ultimate purpose and meaning that goes with the culture of materialism feeds the anxiety that underlies so much of that culture.
Materialism corrodes the confidence we might otherwise have that any search for meaning that we undertake is not necessarily in vain. Intelligent design offers the hope, by the refutation of materialist science, that "something is out there," whatever it might be, capable of granting genuine purpose to our existence.
In other words, if there's a designer it would seem that it must be the very sort of being that could fill the emptiness in the vacant hearts of modern men. No wonder then that ID appeals to those who are still searching for something to make their lives meaningful.