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Originally Posted by ziggytrix
Unlike other sciences such as physics, origin theories are not provable thru direct experimentation. The events have already occured and all we are left with are the handful of pieces to a puzzle that weren't lost long before mammals even existed.
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True, but the evolutionary theory is still falsifiable and testable. Scientists have long claimed that there must have been a fish with amphibian qualities at a certain point in history. This creature must have had a primitive wrist and certain other qualities that cohere with the already established evolutionary charts. And last month they found it, and it was exactly the right age. On the other hand, if we found a feathered hippo, that would mean a big heap of our accumulated knowledge had to be thrown out.
Kali, ID's claim is that things in nature are so complex that they could not possibly have evolved unguided. The main advocate of this "irreducible complexity" is Michael Behe, who was a witness at the Dover trial. Here, he among other things claimed that science could never explain how the blood clotting cascade could have evolved. When he then was presented with a stack of books and papers documenting this exact process, he admitted to not having read a single one of them, but added that whatever they said they had to be wrong. Any other claim ID makes is a negative one, pointing out holes in the evolutionary chart. The irredicible complexity argument is one from ignorance and thus invalid, the fallacy of the negative claims is that pointing out unexplored areas in evolutionary theory does not mean credit should automatically fall on ID theory. Well, as Goat pointed out, it's not a theory in the scientific sense of the word. It's more of a notion.
The designer posited by ID is not, according to the guys themselves, necessarily the Christian god. Many IDers accept the old earth, but pretty much every single one of them is Christian, and for some reason Noah's flood is used to explain just about every geological occurence that discredits the bible. Like the Grand Canyon.
Basically, creationism felt threatened by scientific progress, was unequipped to take on the battle, and had to evolve. It does not actually have scientific traits, but its camoflage keeps it alive.