Intelligent design and unintelligent use of power

Rational people differ on Who God is or what gods are, but should we all believe that the world is the product of intelligent design? That’s what a smart New York columnist, a smart Roman essayist who died in 43 BC, and the smart Discovery Institute researchers who follow science, all contend.

The new book, by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has the audacious title Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025). He covers scientific findings that show underlying order but also social and psychological ones that point to voids in culture, and in our own lives, when we choose to disbelieve. Douthat does all that in a calm tone that will appeal to all but the furiously dogmatic.

The old book, by Marcus Tullius Cicero, is a bundling of two of his works (On the Nature of Gods and The Dream of Scipio) into one volume with the neutral title How to Think About God: An Ancient Guide for Believers and Nonbelievers (Princeton University Press, 2019). It has a non-neutral conclusion, though: “To sum up the existence of deos is so abundantly clear that I regard anyone who denies it as out of his mind.” Cicero believed in a “systematic order of the heavens” that could not be “a random act of nature, for it is highly rational.”

Cicero also thought stars have “intelligence and divinity,” but he was not a flat-earther. He spoke of humans “on the opposite side of the globe” and also had a proto-Christian sensibility that deviated from the standard Roman search for glory: In Philip Freeman’s skillful translation, Cicero asks, “What is human glory really worth? After all, it scarcely lasts for even a fraction of a single year. So gaze upward if you will and contemplate this dwelling place and eternal home…. Place none of your hopes in human rewards…. Let other people worry over what they say about you—they will say it in any case.”

How did western society progress from Cicero’s polytheism? Exploring Christian Heritage, edited by C. Douglas Weaver and Rady Roldán-Figueroa (Baylor University Press, 2024), includes passages from both famous and little-known Christians over the centuries, including Maximus the Confessor (580-662) and Anne Askew (1521-1546). But, starting with Constantine, some Christians came to idolize human glory and power—and that’s still a problem today.

David Fitch’s Reckoning With Power (Brazos Press, 2024) takes on that issue with partial success. Fitch rightly criticizes standard views that “there’s only one kind of power in the world and we, the good people, must get on the right side of it [and use power] to work toward righteous ends.” Instead, he writes about “two kinds of power at work in the world: worldly power, coercively exerted over persons, and godly power, which persuades, heals, reconciles, and reorders.”

Fitch is right that some on the right “use the coercive power of the world to do the unlimited work of God in the name of God,” but he then tilts left and is positive toward “Feminist, Mujerista, Womanist, and Black liberation theologians.” There’s plenty of coercion in those philosophies, and among those who rage about “hegemonic structures of sexuality.”

Fitch even says that social support for “heterosexuality… has never been examined for its own toxicity, its cultural pollution.” Hmm—perhaps Fitch skipped the first chapter of Genesis, which clearly states that God used His power to create humans male and female. Chapter Two adds, “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Terrific, not toxic.

Children are another terrific result of one-fleshness. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery, 2024), shows how she traveled across the United States to interview college-educated women raising five or more children. (My wife and I stopped at four, but Pakaluk doubled down and has eight.)

Good parents use benevolent power that “persuades, heals, reconciles, and reorders,” but some are abusive and others abdicate. Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (Sentinel, 2024) shows how children suffer when parents abdicate and turn their children over to therapists or smartphone stupidity. Shrier, a clever writer, archly points out that “restorative justice” principles are not appropriate in elementary school. 

Meanwhile, a sense that we lack power over our own lives is a foundation of homelessness. James Whitford’s The Crisis of Dependency (Credo, 2024) describes how dozens of people who come to his shelter in Missouri rebuild their executive function by working toward financial independence and not relying on their SNAP (food stamp) cards.

Work is crucial not only for grown-ups but for those growing up, as Maureen Perry-Jenkins shows in Work Matters: How Parents’ Jobs Shape Children’s Well-Being (Princeton University Press, 2022). Employers and officials should help parents find work that will allow them to earn both revenue and respect.