One particularly pertinent paragraph:

“If there is an apparent conflict between science and religion, it is simply because we either don’t understand enough about the science, or we don’t understand enough about the religion.� He gives an example of a colleague and fellow Mormon that he knew in New York. “I had a friend at Columbia who was a Mormon bishop at the time, and whose work should have won him the Nobel Prize. When he was leaving to study physics in college, he asked his father ‘What about religion?’ His father said ‘Son, you only have an obligation to believe that which is true.’ I’ve never forgotten that.�

Re: this idea that no one intelligent would make something complex

a) I think that people are surprised that it seems to “work” whatever that means, and they anticipate that a perfect designer would be required to make a complex system “work.”
b) there is an emphasis on the orderliness of everything, which does appear to be fairly simple.
c) historically complexity was seen as an indication of God’s grace and power, specifically that he was capable of filling every possible miniscule nook both in physical space AND in taxonomic space with subtly graduated variations. People weren’t claiming that he was an uber-engineer, they were claiming that his power and goodness were so overwhelming that he gladly created every possible thing. (Lovejoy has a great summary of this)

I think this also is about the interface between finitude and infinity. There’s a great line in Speak, Memory (Nabokov’s juggernaut of a memoir) that talks about the dizzy juxtaposition of a finite mind and the great infinity of a parent’s love for a child.

This experience that Alma and others talk about, this sense that the vast, orderly complexity of the universe bespeaks the existence of God, in a large part is about our encounter with infinity. How wonderful and reassuring that instead of the nihilist’s abyss that great potential void is filled with an orderly creation of an infinite God.

I think that’s why astronomic objects (I was going to say astrologic but worried the historical reference would be too obscure), mountains, weather, and the oceans are some of the most familiar tropes for this encounter. They are the times that we seem to be encountering objects of infinite vastness or infinite temporal expanse. They represent God’s infinity.

That’s another reason I think we’re so taken with these arguments, and another reason that I am delighted to comprehend nature as an expression of God’s infinite love.

It has occurred to me in reading the book and in reading this thread that there is another aspect to this discussion that we don’t talk much about. In a sense these debates about how to interpret the physical universe are more debates about how to interpret ourselves. We are the ones who are responding to the “immensity” of space, it is our sensuous and (ir)rational experience that denotes the universe as “simple” or “complex,” and we are the ones who determine whether something is beautiful or not.
In many cases (not all), we are focusing on our sense experience, our pleasure, our sense of a place in creation or of stewardship over other created beings/things.

The threat of Darwinism (social and biological) is not that the world isn’t glorious, beautiful, inspiring, or even that there is no God (only in a false dichotomy can you erase God if you believe in Darwinism). It is that we aren’t God’s special creations (or children/nurtured intelligences in Mormon parlance).

In alternate phrasing evolution doesn’t dethrone God, it dethrones us.

Lovejoy argues that this was inherent in the Great Chain of Being from the start, and that in this sense evolution was not a huge change, although that is not how we have in retrospect understood this philosophical shift.

Though you would think I’m denigrating this anthropocentric view of the universe, I find it both comforting and liberating. It leaves me free to delight in the rich complexity of the universe and–because I believe in God for other reasons–to experience it as his kind gift to me. I don’t have to decide the ID debate or frankly take much interest in it. By focusing on my experience of beauty and vastness, I can, without too much philosophical dithering, love God and feel his love for me in a wide variety of natural environments.