"To attack very substantial scientific evidence because it doesn't agree with a 3000 year old creation story is not a good plan for establishing yourself as a credible thinking person."
Creationists believe in an earth less than 10 thousand years old. I don't know where you get the 3k figure. Even Bishop Pike claimed 6000 years.
But beyond that, ID makes no such claim and allows for a very old earth, in the billions of years. I think their side of the story needs a bit more exposure here so allow me to paste from an ID website:
"Intelligent design is a theory for making sense of intelligent causes. As such, intelligent design formalizes and makes precise something we do all the time. All of us are all the time engaged in a form of rational activity that, without being tendentious, can be described as inferring design. Inferring design is a common and well-accepted human activity...There is no magic, no vitalism, no appeal to occult forces. Inferring design is common, rational and objectifiable."
The ability to detect intelligence is common to all people. So common in fact, that we use it every day. Whole fields of study are based on it such as forensics, archaeology, cryptography and so forth. Efforts to discover extraterrestrial life (known as SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) rest on the ability to detect design. Ironically, SETI efforts are driven by naturalists looking for the vindication of their worldview and Neo-Darwinism that a life-filled universe would provide. Detecting design is not some highly complex or miraculous process, it is a simple and very common process inherent to the human race.
Dembski states that IDT is valid science in the face of common objections by naturalists. Naturalists claim science can't point to a creator or designer. This view has become popular in society: "Science and Religion are separate realms." They make this a priori claim at the onset of their arguments. But this is a logical fallacy because they are artificially limiting science by saying what it may or may not do before any research is done. IDT is a valid path in science that can stand independent of religion and philosophy (whether that belief system is Christianity or naturalism).
Biochemist Michael J. Behe further drives home the point that IDT is valid science2:
"To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity; rather, they were planned...
"The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself - not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. Nonetheless, saying that biochemical systems were designed will certainly strike many people as strange, so let me try to make it sound less strange.
"What is 'design'? Design is simply the purposeful arrangement of parts...The scientific problem then becomes, how do we confidently detect design? When is it reasonable to conclude, in the absence of firsthand knowledge or eyewitness accounts, that something has been designed? For discrete physical systems - if there is not a gradual route to their production - design is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components. The greater the specificity of the interacting components required to produce the function, the greater is our confidence in the conclusion of design.
"...there must be an identifiable function of the system. One must be careful...A sophisticated computer can be used as a paper weight; is that a function?...No. In considering design, the function of the system we must look at is the one that requires the greatest amount of the system's internal complexity. We can then judge how well the parts fit the function.
"The function of a system is determined by its internal logic: the function is not necessarily the same thing as the purpose to which the designer wished to apply the system. A person who sees a mousetrap for the first time might not know that the manufacturer expected it to be used for catching mice...but he still knows from observing how the parts interact that it was designed."
Here are some Key Concepts/Definitions regarding IDT, provided by the Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center.
Framework
The following is the framework from which IDT theory and its implications in culture, science and theology are being studied and discussed.3.
1. A scientific and philosophical critique of naturalism, where the scientific critique identifies the empirical inadequacies of naturalistic evolutionary theories and the philosophical critique demonstrates how naturalism subverts every area of inquiry that it touches.
2. A positive scientific research program, known as intelligent design, for investigating the effects of intelligent causes.
3. A cultural movement for systematically rethinking every field of inquiry that has been infected by naturalism and reconceptualizing it in terms of design.
4. A sustained theological investigation that connects the intelligence inferred by IDT with the God of Scripture and therewith formulates a coherent theology of nature.
Point #1 has been successfully achieved through critiques by scholars such as Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Michael Denton4and others. Point #2 is the testable origins model, or IDT. Point #3 will come from the successes of #1 and #2. Point #4 has been spearheaded by the efforts of astronomer Dr. Hugh Ross5and his Reasons to Believe organization.
The Model
The following are the model/theory parts that would (or do) logically point to intelligent design in the universe6,7:
1. transcendent creation event where all matter, energy, spacetime began (Big Bang)
2. cosmic fine-tuning
3. fine-tuning of Earth's, the Solar System's and the Milky Way Galaxy's characteristics
4. rapidity of life's origin
5. lack of inorganic kerogen
6. extreme biomolecular complexity
7. Cambrian explosion (sudden appearance of most species during same time period)
8. missing horizontal branches in the fossil record
9. placement and frequency of "transitional forms" in the fossil record
10. fossil record reversal
11. frequency and extent of mass extinctions
12. rapid recovery from mass extinctions (mainly through appearance of new species)
13. duration of time windows for different species
14. frequency, extent, and repetition of symbiosis
15. frequency, extent, and repetition of altruism
16. speciation and extinction rates
17. recent origin of humanity (as opposed to common descent)
18. huge biodeposits (needed to sustain humanity)
19. molecular clock rates (which show humanity's recent origin)
Creationists believe in an earth less than 10 thousand years old. I don't know where you get the 3k figure. Even Bishop Pike claimed 6000 years.
The "3000 year old creation story" is genesis.
Creationists can't agree on the age of the earth. One of these threads a few weeks back had an age something like 6217 years ago or some such. You are claiming 10 thousand years. Others go with the conventional 4.5 billion.
As for the <10,000 age--sorry, there is no scientific evidence for that. The perversions of data that are required to justify such an age are simply astounding when they show up on these threads!
But the creation story that Creationists believe in and (rather arrogantly) refer to as The Creation Story was only formulated by Israelite priests from other creation stories less than 3000 years ago.
And who is Bishop Pike?
"Pike is a fish:" Buffy the Vampire Slayer