.

Haha. That's funny and entirely appropriate. It is mythology.

When I was at Texas Tech University in 1984, I took a comparative course on evolution and creationism, taught by an anthropology professor. It met off campus specifically because of the creationism content.

In practice, the course became a demolition of creationism. The prof certainly wasn't a creationist, perhaps a quarter or a third of the students were. (I wonder how that ratio has changed in the 20 years since. I'd guess "worse".) One student was a prof of biology at a local Bible college, with a PhD. I found his progression through the class fascinating. Most of the creationists dropped the class as soon as they realized that it wasn't going to rubber-stamp their ideas. But this Bible school teacher stuck through it and became increasingly distressed. The guy had real training in science—he had a biology PhD after all—and he had enough rigor to accept it when creationist theory after theory was knocked down.

Anyway, what I got from that class was exactly what I wanted from it: the ability to argue with the creationists from a standpoint of familiarity with their ideas. What I learned is that young-Earth creationism, as it existed then anyway, is absolute lunacy.

I suppose that we can look at the ID movement as a sort of victory for our side, given that it tries very hard to take the creationist nuttiness and distill it into something at least plausible and more rigorous (relatively speaking) than the slap-dash typical young Earth creationism. On the other hand, it's bad because it's still not science in spirit but it's pretending to be, and it has a foot in the door.

What's the beef with Intelligent Design? Each morning, as I gaze upon my lovely self in the mirror whilst performing my self-affirmation exercises, I am unable to believe that such a magnificent specimen could have occurred by accident.

YMMV.

I've seen your picture, veedub, and I am unable to believe that such a specimen could have occurred without an accident... most likely involving a large truck.
(YOU ASKED FOR IT.)

I'm pretty sure we're something like version 0.2rc5. I mean we're mostly pretty well put together but we're awfully buggy. I mean, think about urinary tract infections and the anatomical characteristics responsible for most of them. Major design flaws like that abound.

ID should stand for Inelegant Design, and if people insist that their God specified every detail on purpose then they're settling for a more slipshod and careless God than I would.

As an ecologist, I've known several religious biology students during my undergrad and postgrad years (Christian and Muslim, in fact). I think they just put some kind of mental block around any topic dealing with evolution, and restrict their understanding to the here and now; this must be incredibly difficult, becase nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It must be difficult because they understand all the low-level processes that lead to natural selection. They understand genetics. They understand ecology. They understand environmental interactions. They understand fecundity. Yet they conveniently refuse to put it all together into the complete package, whereby evolution by natural selection is the only reasonable explanation. Strange thing it is.