At your suggestion, I'll read "Finding Darwin's God". I've read both sides of the argument, and grew-up immersed in Darwinism, as we all did. There's another book I've only perused at the book store, "The Case for a Creator", by Lee Strobel. I remember the interviews with Ph.D. physicists/cosmologists. Like Behe's work, I found it compelling.
There are things, like the Cambrian Explosion, that should make one wonder about ID, completely independent of anything Behe might write. Also, as I recall, either Watson or Crick believed that DNA did not evolve on Earth, but came from elsewhere.
I'm neither a Christian or relgious. Merely curious enough to put aside long-held beliefs and entertain the arguments being made.
Well, in fact, a goodly number of scientists look at the problem of very early life, and other conundrums, and find there's a good case to be made for ID. However, they also mostly understand the difference between idle speculation, that offers, as yet no tangible traction for critical experiment or field work, and natural science. There is another branch of thought, presently spearheaded by Kauffman, Woese and Wolfram, who do perform experiments with critically examinable results, that holds that self-reproductive organization is a natural state of chaotic matter over time, and is inevitable even in the short run.
Kinda easier to get your mits around an ongoing physical phenomenon, than it is to examine a supposed one-shot event a couple of billion years ago.
The "Cambrian Explosion" is an oft quoted troublesome event of creationists and IDers. Explosions sound like exciting events don't they. But it doesn't seem to bother professional biologists so much. The "explosion" did last for tens of millions of years, which is actually a very large number of generations, and there were pre-cambrian organisms, but their fossils were just so small we didn't have the techniques to spot them until relatively recently.
But you just happen to know a large selection of standard creationist mantras yet appear blithely unaware of the equally stock mainstream science refutations. You have somehow been very selective in your reading.
Yea, well, imagine away, that's what makes for good science fiction, however, before we blame the cambrian explosion on the rigelian lizard people, we should look into less surprising natural explanations, such as the lack of calcium saturation in sea water before the mountains heaved out of the water to be leached by erosion. No calcium, no bones or shells; no bones or shells, no great abundance of fossils.
Also, as I recall, either Watson or Crick believed that DNA did not evolve on Earth, but came from elsewhere
Watson, as I remember, who was willing to share quite a few um...speculative theories in his later years. There are a lot of avenues of potential explanation here on earth to exhaust before we can manage to look meaningfully outside earth for explanations.
Also, there's something fundamentally scientifically disfunctional about this--it doesn't really give much of a satisfactory answer, if true. We are still left wondering what the actual mechanisms that brought life to be are; panspermia is a more naturalistic explanation than the goddidit form of ID, but neither answer quells the curiosity bump to any great extent.
Contrary to the expectations of creationists, and the stealth creationists of ID, if ID turns out to hold scientific water, it isn't much more than a small detour for evolutionary theory, and we've had plenty of those already, and evolutionary theory survived them all. There are vividly tangible, incredibly persuasive, massive mountains of highly detailed evidence of the slow grinding process of evolution on biological populations, with a backlog of unexplained, tantalizing enigmas that curious biologists in droves become so enamored with as to dedicate their lives to persuing--and just about none of them will evaporate if ID becomes part of science. The ID game isn't remotely worth the prize its proponents are hoping for, even if they win.
So...I guess I have a piece of advice. I think you should abandon your implied argument that it is lack of imagination that makes scientists uninterested in ID. That's kind of rude, and such is not the case. Because it is an idea inherently lacking in detailed support, ID is shallow comic book brainfood: It lacks the imaginative understructure that makes ideas become satisfying grist for the center stone of the scientific mill. It is a sideshow whose outcome isn't very important to the scientific discussion, regardless of outcome.