My own philosophical but non-theological view of God is almost diametrically opposed to the Intelligent Design idea of God. The universe as it is Desgined TM is a harsh, painful, dog-eat-dog place, where creatures are at the mercy of random events to survive, where the Designer TM has made it so that some animals are eaten by their mates and others must live with parasites eating their bodies from within, a universe ruled by a nature that is purely amoral. There is no morality in the natural world; it just is the way it is. If we are to project a Designer TM from that, well then we've got a demiurgical amoral god. I would like to think that the emergence of morality and a conscience -- which is indeed counter to the amoral forces of natural selection to some extent (e.g. caring for the sick and old, which is something we can now afford to do because we no longer are at the mercy of survival but with culture can now build our own institutions to carry out our own sense of morality) -- represents where something transcendent, something God-like, has come into being ... if only fleetingly. I guess that's pretty much a humanist view, but rather than seeing God in "man", I would see God in a system of organizing principles that transcend those governing natural selection and other natural processes. Could not something higher and (from our own subjective moralistic viewpoint) better than nature be God, tho not its "Designer" per se?
Note that I am only speaking philosophically. Despite the kinship to gnostic ideas, I am not theologically talking about a real divine Creator (since this was based on an extrapolation of observations and assumptions about the natural world), or a personal God per se. But there is something magical if not beautiful about our ability to love and give a damn about others. Yet this does not have to be divorced from nature either. In evolutionary terms, this may be just another level of evolution in which adaptation and selection based on survival (in which organisms are more at the whims of nature and lack control over things) gives way to selection based on a state of affairs no longer so dependent on survival-in-nature. WIth culture guaranteeing an assured food source and institutions enabling the construction of our own rules and systems of organization, we are now able to live in a world we create for ourselves that can follow less and less the beat of nature. But we are also in an inbetween state, however, and thus construct our institutions and affairs along of the lines of the natural world, with our wars and economic/religious/social struggles. At the same time, we can also contemplate and imagine life without these ills (which are ills when viewed morally, but which are no different morally than the genocides and horrors that occur daily in the natural world), and many desire these things as well. So whatever social evolution our culture will take in the future, it seems like we still have a ways to go in living in a system of rules fully transcendent of amoral-cum-immoral forces that we naturally carry with us from our past. And of course we all must still live in the physical world and our culture can crumble at any moment thanks to an asteroid impact or other catastrophe, and leave us more at the whim of nature or survival again.
But as long as culture endures, I am interested in the role of religion and philosophy in the development of a moral conscience (even among atheists, philosophy is an avenue of talking about moral ideas), which I view as a sphere of cultural concepts and ideals constructed within culture that run counter to the amoral forces of nature, and the conflict between this and the role of religion in enforcing the parts of culture that are competition-based and reflective of selective strategies (such as rules enforcing unequal access to resources, subordinating others, etc.).
Anyway, much of this is half-thought out and is just my own idle musings, but I thought I'd say it for what it's worth...