As a literary critic and (hopeful) creator, I find myself taking exception not simply to the idea of Intelligent Design in the anti-Darwinian sense, but in a creative sense, as enumerated in Roger Shattuck's Candor and Perversion:
Few of us can resist the wish to put the pieces of the world together, and we give lasting recognition to some, like Jesus, Muhammad, and Gandhi, who convinced many others that they could makes sense of it all. There is nothing original about saying that the widely held belief among artists and writers in a universal unity represents a survival of religion in secularized form. Few of them would reject any connection at all to spiritual experience... R.P. Warren says what most artists, let alone ordinary citizens, would agree with: "I am a man of religious temperament in the modern world who hasn't got any religion." But in fact he does. He practices religion in a diluted form, which we accept as artistic and literary, a poetic faith without worship or ethics. It is difficult to say how long analogy alone will sustain and satisfy us. (49)
I take exception not to Shattuck's (accurate) observation that many people believe "in a universal unity," whether they call it god or a human spirit, but, rather, to 1) the suggestion that an artist/writer expressing anything other than complete nihilism must be religious, and, 2) the implication that "analogy alone" will be incapable of "sustain[ing] and satisfy[ing] us."
First, when Warren says he "hasn't got any religion," he is most likely correct. To say that he "practices religion in a diluted form" is offensive - both to the act of artistic creation (which is not "diluted" in any way) and to the idea that one may be creative without investing in some sort of "religion." Creativity and imagination do not require the existence of religion, deity, or a larger metaphysical plane in order to exist. And to imply that an artist (under which category I include "writer") needs something beyond him or herself in order to produce something of beauty and value is offensive to the artist.
Is creation truly nothing more than "religion in a secularized form"? A positive answer is understandable; after all, for centuries nearly all art was religious in nature. However, does that necessitate that art is religious? Does it mean that simply because an artist works with a religious medium, mythos, or image, that he or she must believe in its supernatural elements? Certainly, no one would suggest that simply because an artist painted a picture of a minotaur that he or she believes the minotaur is real.
And this leads, finally, to my counter-question. Why cannot "analogy alone... sustain and satisfy us"? We think, reason, and dream in analogies. We relate to one another in terms of metaphor and simile, we recognize our emotions in images and words that are not the things we think of upon viewing them. Why may not an "analogy" satisfy our creative, our emotional, or rational minds? After all, if I am right, then the greatest religions in the world have made a millennia-long practice of sustaining and satisfying with nothing more than "analogy alone."
So why do we constantly attempt to mitigate our own talents and creations? Why do we, as a species, constantly attribute our art, our skills, our talents, to the intervention or blessing of a deity? Quite simply, because of fear. Because our society recognizes a kind of selfless ecstasy in the act of imaginative creation, and is afraid to attribute that kind of raw and unmitigated power to a mere human being. Because if we acknowledge that we are capable of Creation, then we become gods. And if we are gods, then we must accept not only the power, but the responsibility that accompanies it. And if we accept that responsibility, then we must acknowledge that, as the gods of ourselves and our world, we have been terrible gods indeed.