The watchmaker analogy has been abused by the ID/Creationist crowd for decades now, but they miss the whole point. Watches are built for a specific purpose, so the designer plans and assembles them with that purpose in mind. It is not a random process, every step of it is planned and preconceived. What terrifies them about evolution is not that it is anti- religious; after all, what's to stop god from using evolution to create life, just as he used Newton's Laws to animate the solar system. No, what horrifies them is that evolution is indeed a random process, that once the laws of chemistry and physics are specified, and the properties of the universe set, evolution is perfectly capable of occuring without any supervision at all, indeed, it is inevitable. This leads to the possibility that the result of evolution, complex and adaptive life, has no purpose at all.

Whether or not the universe has a purpose is a legitimate, debatable question, and I don't pretend to know the answer to it. But the possibility that it's still up in the air and still has no definite answer terrifies them. They are incapable of making the conceptual leap that in order to create watches, god had to set in motion the process of evolution in order to create watchmakers. After all, we know for a fact that god cannot make watches without the assistance of men.