David Novak has an excellent review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Already in the first paragraph Novak sets a scholarly tone by taking Dawkins argument seriously and by addressing the important philosophical issues without resorting to the dismissive rhetoric so common in today’s religious debate.

Being an argument (however badly presented), the basic assertions of this book deserve a reasoned response, even though its overall tone is more likely to elicit an emotional reaction–either a positive reaction from those who love Dawkins’ atheism or a negative reaction from those who hate it.

Novak indeed provides a reasoned response. In doing so, he articulates a key philosophical problem with Intelligent Design and offers an alternative view that I think is much more in line with traditional Judaism.

Intelligent Design seems to be an argument for an immanent God. That is, it seems to be an argument for the existence of a cause who shows himself, or at least shows his specific operations, within the world of human experience, which is the world natural science attempts to accurately describe and whose causal workings it attempts to explain. As such, Intelligent Design seems to be saying much more than simply asserting that God created the world in general. Instead, it seems to be saying how God created the world specifically. But, since Intelligent Design (and its various cognates) states something about the world, it is indeed a hypothesis. And, since it seems to be invoking at least a god, we now have a theologically inspired hypothesis at that, thus calling into question the famous retort of the scientist Pierre Laplace, quoted as a kind of slogan by Dawkins, to Napoleon’s query about the place of God in the world constituted by modern science: “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”
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Taking up Dawkins’ challenge, such theologians (among whom I count myself) can either argue for the hypothetical value of Intelligent Design or something like it, or can show that their “God-talk” (the original meaning of theo-logy) is not the proposal of any scientific hypothesis at all. Such theologians need to show how their theological opponents are guilty of what philosophers call a “category error” by confusing the language and logic of theology with the language and logic of natural science. Such “hypothetical” use of the name of God, usually called “natural theology,” is philosophically superfluous and, on theological grounds, it might well be guilty of taking the name of the Lord in vain. Furthermore, the “God of the philosophers” that Dawkins attacks is anyway not a God “appropriate for worship,” which is how Dawkins himself defines the word “God.” Worship, as distinct from individual contemplation, is a public activity that takes its vocabulary from the historical accounts of the relationship between the subjects of worship, who are the worshiping community, and the object of worship, who is God. Natural theology, though, only gives us contemplation. For these reasons, then, I enjoyed Dawkins’ putdown of some of these natural theologians, but without buying what he proposes in their stead.

We could say that statements about God are not scientific hypotheses at all, since we are not speaking of God as a cause operating within the natural order, which is the sole order about which natural science can speak with any cogency. And, even when we do speak of God as the creator of the universe and all it contains, we are not speaking of a God whose existence has been inferred from human experience of orderly nature. Instead, we are speaking of a God who commands our community, through his historical revelation to our community, to acknowledge his creation of that natural order in which our historical relationship with him takes place. So, all that this asserts about the world is that the world is a creature, ever dependent on its creator, but in specific ways beyond our ken inasmuch as there is no evidence for creation from within what we normally or ordinarily experience in the world–a point best made when God finally reveals himself at the end of the book of Job.
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Anything we can cogently say about God can only be based on a revelation of God we have either experienced firsthand or heard from people whose accounts of what they did experience we have no reason to distrust. For Jews, that prime experience is the revelation of the Tora at Mount Sinai and the Exodus from Egypt that made it possible for the people of Israel to experience that revelation. Not being a hypothesis but, rather, testimony, all that Dawkins could argue about it is that such experience is improbable, but not impossible, the only impossibility being logical impossibility. But such experience is by definition improbable…

I highly recommend reading the whole article.