Intelligent Design

I'm one of those liberal college professors whom conservatives accuse of trying to brainwash students. What would they make of an observation made by one of my students in the reflective essay that I require as a final exam. She's a conservative Christian, being home-schooled through high school while taking some college courses, and she was in a course where I require students to read one of the Harry Potter novels, conduct research on it, and write a formal research paper on it. She said in her final that she wasn't so sure, in the beginning, that she should read Harry Potter because it dealt with witchcraft, which she regarded as a sin. In the end, though, she said that the experience had led her to think more prayerfully and pray more thoughtfully, and she had grown intellectually and spiritually. I don't know when I've been so proud of a student.
I went from grading papers to reading an editorial by a historian on intelligent design. He didn't much like what he saw as the underlying assumption that the whole universe was created for the benefit of Terran humanity--an assumption that he found in nineteenth century textbooks. The historian part of me should want to agree with him. But I think there's more to intelligent design than the idea that people are somehow the crown of creation. Surely any of us who spend time in stores or shopping malls during the holiday season realize that God could have made people a lot smarter and more thoughtful--particularly if they were going to represent the high point of creation.
But intelligent design, to me, is the acknowledgment that science doesn't have all the answers and probably never will. Even the part of the universe that we know is the product of the confluence of a number of variables far beyond human comprehension. Even processes that scientists can explain fairly well, such as photosynthesis, leave questions unanswered: Just why is it that the chemicals involved are present in the right quantities and proportions, and why do they react as they do? Those unanswered questions, to me, loom large as a reminder of the limitations and imperfections in human knowledge, even in the supposedly reliable sciences. (That would be the same sciences that taught me, when I was an undergraduate, that there was a plant kingdom and an animal kingdom. A friend of mine in the biology department tells me that today there are considered to be no fewer than five kingdoms of living things.) That recognition could be the basis for people to have some humility that seems to be largely missing from the whole debate over the origins and development of life.
Or so it seems to me.