Gary, I am not a theologian. I can only repeat what I hear theologian say about the whole creation/ID/evolution business. I am happy to supply you with list of Christian philosophers since this is part of the research going into my thesis.
In short, God is seen of having created the universe
“with no functional deficiencies, no gaps in its economy of the sort that would require God to act immediately, temporarily assuming the role of a creature (in the physical universe) to perform functions within the economy of the creation that other creatures have not been equipped to perform.
When the Creator says, ‘Let the land produce vegetation,’ or ‘Let the water teem with living creatures,’ or ‘Let the land produce living creatures,’ a world created with functional integrity will, by the enabling power and directing governance of God, be able to respond obediently and employ its capacities to carry out the intentions of the Creator.” (quoted from Howard Van Till).
Ernan McMullin, a philosopher of religion and Catholic priest, has also written extensively on the topic of evolution. I can highly recommend three books by (Catholic) John Haught who is Senior Fellow in Science and Religion at the Woodstock Theological Center and professor of theology at Georgetown university, titled: “Science and Faith”, “Making sense of evolution” and “God and the new atheism”.
Or, we can take the Church herself, in one of her documents, Communion and Stewardship. Paragraph 69 highlights the evolution/ID debate:
“69. The current scientific debate about the mechanisms at work in evolution requires theological comment insofar as it sometimes implies a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. Many neo-Darwinian scientists, as well as some of their critics, have concluded that, if evolution is a radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation, then there can be no place in it for divine providential causality. A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology.”
Yet then the paragraph continues, clearly outlining why evolution (even as taken without biological ID), even as a process without what we usually would call constant ‘intervention’, and even as one involving random processes (in genetic variation; cumulative natural selection on genetic variation as a substrate makes evolution overall a non-random process), can nonetheless be a process falling under Divine Providence:
“But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).”
So the power of intelligence is not an illusion! The question is how it originated…