Yeah, well everyone also thought the world was flat back then too. But what interests me more in your response is...
"Because it's the truth that ID is not based on religion."
Just what or who is the "Intelligence" behind the design that "creationists" believe in.
You got the wrong guys, DG. Aristotle, Pythagorus and Ptolemy all believed the world was a sphere, a globe. They based these beliefs on actual observations, such as the varying altitudes of star sight lines, shadows cast by Earth on the moon, the appearance of distant ships approaching at the horizon, etc.
Yeah, well everyone also thought the world was flat back then too. But what interests me more in your response is...
As Bonaparte shows in the post above that is incorrect. The point is that many people who were not Christians also believed in ID - which answers your other question.
In addition, the question of whether ID is religious or not is immaterial. Evolutionists routinely assert that materialism is true yet they do not wish to test their assertion against non-materialist explanations. ID is a non-materialist explanation, that's for sure. However, it has to be disproven scientifically not out of hand as you and evolutionists would like to do. ID asks some very pertinent questions of evolution which neither you nor other evolutionists care to answer:
1. Because species cannot mate with other species (and this is a scientific fact) it is impossible for them to transform themselves into other species and have someone to procreate with.
2. The inextricable specific complexity of organisms makes it impossible to change them by chance. We did not know even a millionth of how complex they really were until the 20th century but nevertheless, even then they were known to be too complex for them to transform themselves at random.
Evolutionists cannot answer the above, they have no evidence to dispute the above claims of ID which are well supported by SCIENTIFIC evidence. That is why they wish to rule out an Intelligent Design explanation out of hand.