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Invoking God for every unexplained phenomenon has a tendency to stifle investigation into that phenomenon. Why should we strive to learn anything if the answer is "God did it, 'nuff said?" If man just blindly accepted, based on faith, that God was behind everything, we'd still believe lightning bolts and rainbows to be mystical signs from God and not the natural phenomena they really are. The same goes for evolution. Contrary to what many creationists claim modern biology is founded upon evolutionary theory. One need only pick up a copy of Scientific American to learn that evolutionary theory is behind the great advances in the battles against diseases and cancer.

Why couldn't it have happened naturally? Chance plays only a part in evolution -- there is a driving force which guides evolution and that is the environment. Individual mutations may arise by chance (and there is strong evidence they do) but it is the environment which determines which mutations make it into the breeding population and are thus handed down to the next generation.

I agree with everything you've said here. The question you begin with is a good one. It could have indeed happened naturally. This is the $64,000 question. Has it been demonstrated that random mutations and natural selection are capable of generating specified complexity? If it has, I am unaware of it. Dembski has said repeatedly that if it can be shown that these two mechanisms, or any set of natural mechanisms can generate specified complexity, his theory will be refuted completely.

Invoking God for every unexplained phenomenon has a tendency to stifle investigation into that phenomenon. Why should we strive to learn anything if the answer is "God did it, 'nuff said?" If man just blindly accepted, based on faith, that God was behind everything, we'd still believe lightning bolts and rainbows to be mystical signs from God and not the natural phenomena they really are. The same goes for evolution. Contrary to what many creationists claim modern biology is founded upon evolutionary theory. One need only pick up a copy of Scientific American to learn that evolutionary theory is behind the great advances in the battles against diseases and cancer.

A few questions, and a few points. Why do you say that ID theory "invokes God", or says "God did it"? Intelligent design works on the premise that we have the ability to know (usually) when something is designed, and when it is not. Would you accuse an archaeologist of invoking the scribe-of-the-gaps when he finds a tablet and declares that a human intelligence created it?

Intelligent Design merely says that design, represented by specified complexity, is detectable. This is a widely known fact. Let's try and apply it to biology. Please tell me why asserting that biological complexity is the result of an intelligent designer, will stifle scientific inquiry? Would we want any less to know how this intelligent designer did it? I fail to see why we would cease to try and understand biological systems simply because we believe they have their origin in an intelligence. Isn't it odd that Newton, and the other Christian founders of science (which most were), didn't find their inquiry stifled? Upon what do you base your assertion anyway?

Finally, your last assertion states that "evolutionary theory is behind the great advances in the battles against diseases and cancer". It would be better stated that micro-evolutionary theory is beind these great advances. Speciation has nothing whatever to do with curing diseases. As has been pointed out before, no ID theorist denies that genes mutate, natural selection is a real phenomena, and that species share ancestry. Now, many ID theorists will differ in how deep said ancestry goes. Some believe in a common ancestor, others do not.