Are We Living In God's "Matrix"?

[dissily mordentroge]

Why should it be taken that 'intelligent designer' is necessarily the same or similar entity as 'God'?

Because that's our placeholder for it. It means nothing more than it says, and shouldn't overly worry us. Certainly nothing to get hung up about.

Obviously I failed to make my point. Essentially I can't see why it's not possible to imagine an intelligent designer/s as an advanced civilisation rather than any kind of deity. However, as the first aboriginal tribes reacted when encountering the white man they often thought they were interacting with 'Gods'. We may react in the same way if we encountered any civilisation sufficiently advanced to have created our universe experiencing it as totally beyond our immediate understanding.
On the other hand there's always the possibility such an entity would need to terminate it's own existence in order to introduce randomness and free will as part of it's creation. Kind of suicide on a cosmic scale . So, we may find ourselves here as the product of intelligent design but be left with no evidence of a creators identity. This leaves us totally responsible for our own future and survival, a concept obviously utterly too terrifying for those who need to be cushioned by theological certainties, even if those certainties are of a sado masochistic kind such as Christianity's central message of redemption through suffering.
Hope that makes some kind of sense.