No question. But I also see scientists make some pretty outrageous remarks about the "little people" who refuse to give up their misconceptions. There was an amusing flurry in American Spectator in which a letter writer claimed that the belief in Intelligent Design would end all scientific query. The letter quoted Newton who it just so happens, believed in intelligent design (no caps). I could easily see a future in which it was proven and accepted that there is intelligence embedded in all of creation and was accepted and proven scientific fact. Regarding the people who try to force it into schools, it's premature to say the least! Let them keep working on intelligent design. If they come up with something indisputable and provable then it will come to be accepted and the more hysterical Darwinists will be the ridiculed ones.
But Darwin started off believing 'Intelligent Design'--virtually everyone in the West, prior to Darwin's Origins, believed in some form of 'Intelligent Design' (whether literal Biblical account in Genesis, or some more Deistic view). That model eventually collapsed because the accumulated evidence against it was simply overwhelming--apart from a small number of 'fundamentalists', who appear to be refugees from reality. The vast majority of Christians have no more difficulty with Darwin than they have with the notion of the earth circling the sun (a 'belief' once persecuted by the Church as a heresy)
Creationism/ID is not some innovation--it's a re-tread of a cosmology that prevailed for the best part of 2000 years of Western history--and many of those were particularly unsavoury times.
I could easily see a future in which it was proven and accepted that there is intelligence embedded in all of creation and was accepted and proven scientific fact. Regarding the people who try to force it into schools, it's premature to say the least! Let them keep working on intelligent design. If they come up with something indisputable and provable then it will come to be accepted and the more hysterical Darwinists will be the ridiculed ones.
Science is open to anyone who wishes to learn the scientific method--which remains our best tool for developing empirical knowledge. No hypothesis is protected from challenge on scientific grounds, so no theory is ever absolute dogma--which is a major way in which science and religion differ. Creationism, by starting with religious answers before it poses questions, cannot be science--because it cannot acknowledge any scientific answers which are contrary to its religioous premises.
Ultimately, you are right, it is a matter of probabilities. There is a tiny probablity that the law of gravity won't hold if I leap from the roof of my office--but I am confident enough that it will that I'll pass on testing it yet again, if you don't mind!
I agree with most of what you said there (although I think it unlikely that the future will bring forth any evidence for intelligent design that is not somehow interpretable in other ways). And, yes, Newton was a sort of a Christian; interestingly, his manuscripts contain far about alchemy than they do about physics and mathematics. He was a strange bird, no doubt about it.
They'll have to *start* working on it before they can *keep* working on it. As of now I've not yet seen any evidence of work on a theory of intelligent design. They don't construct any experiments that might disprove it. They don't come up with any useful predictions. Zip, zilch, nada. All they try to do is end-run round the scientific process to get their hypothesis into the classroom.
The day they start doing some science I'll be the first to applaud them.