"This is like teaching that the world is flat or that the sun orbits the earth. ID is a relic of the dark ages."
Actually, I thought the same about the religion of evolution. At what point will this "belief" be abandoned, and why is it held so dearly?
Finally, while there is no mention of religion or theology in the Bible, it's principles are the basis for human freedom. I do not see, frankly, how conservatives come to their core views (constitutional adherence) without faith in God. How else can "endowed by their Creator" be reconciled ? This is, again, in my opinion, the foundational premise "truth" from which all else in our system of government flows. Without this, laws are made by men, reconciled to nothing, and we are slaves.
Granted, uncharateristically long rant .
And on this note, I will be leaving this thread before I get banned.
Evolution is not a religion. That argument is old and tired. Evolution is just a more scientifically rigorous proposition than ID.
The theory is held so dearly for the same reason the theories of physics are held dearly -- because those theories don't require magic or some spirit being be there to hold the hand of the universe and to make it function in the way we see it function.
People once thought that lighting was caused by evil spirits. They would literally ring church bells to drive them away. But now we know that no spirits are necessary.
At some point I hope most people will realize that the existence of human beings doesn't require spirits or magic.
"At what point will this "belief" be abandoned, and why is it held so dearly? "
It will be abandoned when it can be replaced by a scientifically validated and testable theory that explains the observations and data. ID doesn't do it. Evolution does. It is "held so dearly" in your words because science is needed to explain the natural history of the world. ID cannot replace evolution because it is based on faith and not strictly on observable scientific data.
"there is no mention of religion or theology in the Bible"
You clearly know nothing of the Bible. The Bible is filled with religious content. Christ was crucified because of his threat to the Jewish religion. He spoke of forming a new religion.
You don't have to be a Bible believer to believe in a creator.
Anyway, I came to the right because logic led me here.
Evolution is about the how and the when, not the who.
How do you define 'religion'?
Which of the many fields of science that contribute to the SToE do you believe is/are religion?
There is the empirical observation that liberty has the greatest likelihood of contributing to human happiness.
There is the simple human quality of empathy, of seeing someone else as a being with the same feelings and desires as you have. That is the basis of the Golden Rule, or of Kant's categorical imperative, a notion that pre-dates the records of any current religion.
How did these qualities come to be present in most humans? You could point to natural selection, that social organisms hard-wired to cooperate are more likely to survive than ones that are hard-wired toward killing each other.
Or to get really deep, you could go with the Kantian notion of a synthetic a priori, an idea that is inherent to any system of logic that logic cannot exist without it.
Or you could subscribe to the notion of a social contract, which is not inherent in humans, but once tried turned out to work really well, and has been renegotiated -- or evolved, ooh, there's that word -- over the last several millennia.
None of those denies the existence of God, but they don't rely on Him to explain what we can observe. Just as observing evaporation, condensation and precipitation to explain the rain doesn't deny that God put those mechanisms in motion.