Intelligent Design - Unintelligent Designer?

The recent movement to teach so-called “Intelligent Design” in the schools raises many questions that its proponents have not begun to talk about.
As you may know, Intelligent Design is the theory that assumes that life as we know it is too complex to have evolved by accident, but instead implies a deliberate design. The implication is that the designer is God, but that is not made explicit to avoid church-and-state issues in the schools.
Now, ID is a little weak in specifics. It recalls a famous Sidney Harris cartoon, showing two scientists at a blackboard full of equations. In the middle of the math is the phrase “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS”. One says, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” This aspect is the one that most criticism of ID centers around.
There is another aspect that I have not yet seen addressed. ID advocates say that the theory says nothing about the designer, yet they clearly want us to think of the Christian God. What if it’s not the Christian God, but Zeus and the other Olympians? Or Rama, or some other members of the Hindu pantheon? What if it’s actually The Brain From Planet Arous that designed us? Nothing is solved by this; it just puts the question back one more step – where did the designer(s) come from?
And what if there is not one designer, but many? So many of the really complex designs around us are the product of many different minds, each working on a single aspect (recalling the old joke that a giraffe is a horse designed by a committee). Automobiles, airplanes and Windows operating systems are far less complex than the simplest bacterium, but the design process for each of those receives input from many minds, each of whom is building on the work of many other people. They do not have to invent tires or fuel injectors from scratch, much less the chemistry of fuels or paints. The famous Honeywell round thermostat was the work of one designer, but he did not have to invent the thermostat, central heating or the free enterprise system. While this point can be argued back and forth as to its relevance to evolution, it is necessary to emphasize that every example of complex design that we know of rests on the work of many past and present designers, discoverers and inventors.
Beyond this is that design implies intent and intent implies purpose. The ID’ers seem to run under the assumption that we are here for God’s purposes, perhaps to praise him or to perfect ourselves according to divine plan. This would further imply a perfect – because divine – plan, and a mature design. But could we be someone’s apprentice project? Or worse, someone’s “The Apprentice” project? Could there be some cosmic Donald Trump about to tell our designer “You’re fired!”? Maybe we are not even up to that level, but the equivalent of one of those elementary school dioramas made with toy dinosaurs, flocking trees and tinfoil lakes. Maybe we are some junior deity’s fingerpainting, and it is almost time to go home and hang on whatever junior deities’ parents have in place of refrigerators. It could be worse. We could be part of a mass-production run, one of countless virtually identical Earths available in fine universes near you. We might be a prank, or a holiday ornament, or a chew toy for some vast entity’s pet. Earthly life might be a demonstration model. It could be someone’s bad example: This is what you get when you set the reproductive drive too high, or you base your lifeforms on carbon molecules. We could be the result of a biological warfare project, intended to spread beyond our planet and damage other worlds, or the mold growing on some cosmic leftover, or the equivalent of some pest-control bacterium.
There is a great deal of unspoken hubris on the part of the ID’ers. I strongly suspect that none of the people pushing Intelligent Design has given much thought to these questions. After thinking about it myself, I would rather not know the answers.