No need to shut up Robert, you're doing fine. Yours is a viewpoint that deserves to be heard.

I actually draw a line similar to yours between religion and science; to render unto science what is science's, and to acknowledge what is not. Science is all about the how and when; the pure "why" (not semantically confused with "how") is by definition not Science's territory. Cosmology can take us right back to the instant of the Big Bang...but beyond that point it's as legitimate to say that God ordained the Big Bang as any other speculation. Cosmologists enjoy speculating about the "why", but to their credit, and unlike religion, they have the humility and wisdom to acknowledge that they're speculating.

In that spirit you'll stipulate that God is working through evolution. No problem; that's a "why". But that is not Intelligent Design. ID, just like Creationism, argues that evolution is wrong because evolution is insufficient to explain the complexity of the world. It requires God pulling on the strings directly, and not just sitting back to watch evolution unfold.

IDiots remain stubbornly oblivious to the many strong rebuttals made by real scientists. Richard Dawkins has a particularly strong explanation of why it is indeed possible for the eye to evolve, and not once but many times independently. But IDiots and Creationists are not scientists, despite all their pathetic posturing to the contrary. Real scientists weigh all the evidence and evaluate all the arguments.

Part of my strong visceral dislike of the ID&C crowd is that wolf-in-sheep's-clothing attempt to appropriate the respectability of science to cloak anti-science. Robert, how would you feel if I walked up to the pulpit in your church one Sunday, and began spouting a twisted form of Scripture designed to discredit your church? You'd be justified in viewing me as a dishonest sneak, a thief in the night stealing what's precious to you, and spitting on your beliefs. It's that way for all of us who value science.

As do you. I'm not trying to cut you out of the herd because of your faith. It sounds like you've found a proper balance between religious and science. I just dispute whether IDers and Creationists have any right to claim the same.

At one point you asked what I'm afraid of. Certainly not the truth. I'm afraid that Bush and other politicians pandering to a religious extermist voting bloc will usher in Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". The relentless pushing of emotional buttons like gay marriage to garner votes fosters irrationality over rationality. Recent Republican rhetoric celebrates the superiority of Middle America's gut to the "elites"...including scientists. A core danger is that all this makes Americans more vulnerable to demagogues seeking to manipulate the electorate for its own purposes.

At another point you asked what's wrong with presenting both sides to children so that they can judge for themselves. Children? You mean the little larval humans we don't trust to cross the street without supervision, nor to vote before they reach eighteen? Who can't be trusted with alcohol until they're twenty one? Who we feel the need to train fulltime for a couple of decades before they can join society? That's a particularly disingenuous argument, because we know that children believe what authority figures tell them, and the obvious agenda is to allow religious conservatives a chance to indoctrinate the young before they've developed the critical faculties to recognize bullshit when they see it. It's not about giving them a chance to judge; it's about preventing them from judging. Indoctrination of children has long been an ideological battleground, because all sides know the value of "getting 'em while they're young".

If Intelligent Design is such baloney, then science should have no problems blowing it out of the water

Lovely sentiment in a naively idealistic way, but c'mon, you know better. You're assuming a fair fight; it isn't a fair fight with the government's thumb on the scale taking sides.

Well, one man's Demon Haunted World may be another man's Biblical Paradise, but not for me. Fundamentally I fear that the confluence of right-wing political ambition with the increasing militancy of not only Islam but of Christianity, will usher in a second Dark Age.