You can tell my opinion by the fact that I moved this out of #science but I’ll elaborate a bit.
But first off let me recount an interesting remark by @tjwhale.
Who said that in thrive the player species is being intelligently designed by the player whereas the AI species follow evolution / natural selection (albeit slightly simplified in order to reduce the amount of computing power the game needs).
Isn’t that neat?
Now to my “opinion” about intelligent design in the real world. First off, it’s not really even a theory: it has no predictive power and there is no way to out it to the test. So that basically disqualifies it from even being a theory and being useful to think about. It’s basically just an extension of saying that there is some mysterious stuff going on, as an alternative to an actually working, testable theory, that makes useful predictions possible.
Edit: I hope I don’t upset anyone too badly with this post.
One more thing I’d like to say is that there are parallels to string theory here. Basically the case with string theory is that the it makes no predictions we can test, also any physical phenomena we have observed can be modeled with other theories as well, so string theory is providing an alternative, more complex, reason for things being the way there are. Similarly I think that saying that an intelligent designer is behind the variety of life we see around us, is similarly useless as our observations and theories about evolution explain everything. So intelligent design is trying to provide an alternative, more complex, explanation for things that are already understood without it. In my opinion this leaves no room for intelligent design to be useful ““theory””.