“Intelligent design vs. ‘God of the gaps'”

The title isn’t mine — I would have avoided the term intelligent design because, for good or bad reasons, it tends to elicit something of a knee-jerk negative reaction from some folks — but, anyway, here’s this week’s installment of my regular Deseret News column:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865675712/Intelligent-design-vs-God-of-the-gaps.html

(I actually think that faithful Latter-day Saints must believe in “intelligent design” in at least some sense.  It’s impossible to read the first chapters of Genesis, or Moses, or Abraham, or to attend the temple, without being taught a form of “intelligent design.”  That doesn’t necessarily oblige us to agree with the contemporary “Intelligent Design” movement in whole or even in part, but it certainly suggests that the notion of purposive intelligence in creation is an essential part of Mormonism, as it is of other types of theism.)