Wow, whole lot of thoughts to respond to.
Well, personally, I don’t think intelligent design makes for a compelling scientific theory. Taken as a whole, it provides some interesting criticisms, but nothing I’ve read has really produced a coherent, alternative, testable, and falsifiable set of hypotheses. Of course, the immediate response is that neither has evolution, but I think that arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. ID, pseudo-religious thought, and religious ideas derive from a premise that there exists a basis for objective reality and it is known. Certain dimensions may not be known, of course, but nevertheless, ID, for example, posits that there is a creator. Why? Because complexity cannot arise spontaneously. However, it is difficult to see how this can at all be falsifiable or tested. Is the simple existence of complexity sufficient to say that there is a guiding hand? I would say no, and (to start) for two reasons. First, because many complex systems spontaneously emerge. For example, ecosystems (which can be man-made), markets (see Smith and Hayek on spontaneous order), and emergence theories applied to cities and other complex entities. Second, and this is the key difference between evolutionary science and ideas like ID, because beginning from this premise is a fundamental methodological error. Avin, to my mind, gets close to this point in his original post, but not quite. ID is a purely logical deduction without necessarily referencing anything in reality, which is why the falsifiability criteria is so important. With evolutionary hypotheses, the fossil record acts as a reference point of objective events. But the mistake many people make is assuming that evolutionary biology is complete. It is not. It is constantly being added to and changed, and its fundamental premises can be challenged. However, ID inherently contains an untestable, unfalsifiable baseline assumption of a guiding hand, and my primary concern is that cannot be contested. It is not a scientific theory: rather, it is a series of interesting criticisms which, however, don’t strike the heart of what evolution is.
One final point before having to get back to work. The gaps in evolutionary theory: I believe most people point to this because they expect the theory to be complete. Evolutionary biology is necessarily a partly historical science. We can understand the processes, mechanisms, and chemistry undergirding population change, but developing a picture of how it actually happened in the past requires comparatively softer methods than physics or chemistry. This is not to say that these “softer” procedures are methodologically suspect. I think far too many people talk about faults in the fossil record as if they could actually show that the procedures for dating and analyzing the record are suspect. This to my mind hasn’t at all been shown, at least not from sources without inherent and methodological biases and without invalidating pretty concrete chemical and physical principles. This does make proving evolutionary hypotheses more difficult, but it is not guesswork as some have suggested, and it is far from faulty in the crippling way that others have remarked.
I think above all, everyone must be extremely careful methodologically. Thus far, I have read numerous statements for or against ID which to my mind are simply unprovable assertions. Problems with evolution exist, certainly: but (if they are specified, and I notice most people don’t bother to specify what exactly is in contention) they can be met with testing and reasoned debate. But, I would be very interested in reading thoughts on how these methodologies can be applied to ID.