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Your argument is self-referential, since you are making an ad-hominum attack on the critics of ID without saying what the weaknesses of evolution are, or how you would know they are weakness unless mainstream scientists openly discussed them.

Huh? Where am I making any attacks? For the record, I think that the ToE makes a very compelling case, though incomplete.

ID fails not because it is wrong, but because it contributes nothing to the sum of knowledge.

How so? If ID manages to demonstrate that certain biological tissues, organs, systems, or organisms are irreducibly complex, this would blow a major hole into the ToE which Darwin himself acknolwedged. To my mind, this would contribute a huge amount to the sum of human knowledge, even if it doesn't necessarily prove what many creationists would like it to.

Overall, I think you have things bass-ackwards. The ToE is the champ. ID is a criticism. It does not propose a full-blown alternate theory--yet. However, it will cause Darwinian evolutionists to explain away a whole host of theoretical irreducible complexities.

For the record--I've laid out my religious beliefs pretty clearly (see tagline--I'm Catholic). What are your beliefs?

If ID manages to demonstrate that certain biological tissues, organs, systems, or organisms are irreducibly complex...

How do you go about proving a negative? How many centuries, for example do you give science to plug the holes in Newton's equations before it becomes impossible? By what standard or logic or human experience do you declare something impossible?

You should be aware that every example of irreducible complexity from Behe's original formulation has become reducible with research.

If ID manages to demonstrate that certain biological tissues, organs, systems, or organisms are irreducibly complex, this would blow a major hole into the ToE ....

False. One must additionally give evidence that these IC phenomena can't or wouldn't have evolved. Behe's argument is woefully inadequate because he ignores, among other things, neutral changes and structures evolving through loss of function.

It seems to me that the appropriate target for ID is not Irreducibly Complex structures but rather Irreducibly Fit ones. That is, if one could find numerous systems in which all smallish changes *increase* fitness, it would be strong evidence against evolution of those structures.