Why can't both theories coexist? The world may have be created just 5 minutes ago! But how could you know that? The world could be created to have a history. You could've been created to think that you've existed for dozens of years.

Anyways, religions are always about belief. They aren't something you can prove or otherwise they wouldn't be a question of faith. Arguments between sciences and religion are always void.

Actually, it could also have been created half an hour from now.

The US is causing worldwide problems in this area. We cannot allow religious fanatics to undo hundreds of years of scientific thinking. We should not allow this sort of nonsense to spred. People need to be taught what science is, not just what science says. Otherwise the lay person cannot tell the difference between the two sets of "facts" that the scientists and the fanatics are feeding them.

That's really not funny. There are people that actually believe what you just said. You should never even pretend to agree with these people. They are a horrible blight on society.

I thought this was a pretty good summary of my feelings:
http://www.biosurvey.ou.edu/oese/theories8yd8gr.gif

I'm sure this has been posted before: http://www.idrewthis.org/2005/gravity.html

For me, religion would seem to be within the realm of the household, not state-sponsored education. Your parents can beat you with the Jesus Stick(tm) all day long, but once you go to school you should be asked to deal with things that are... like... empirical, ya know?

The separation of church and state is a good thing.

I wouldn't say that about all religions though. Some of them aren't so bad. Generally the ones that just focus on ways of life rather than belief systems are ok. It's the forcing of unfounded beliefs onto others that I'm against.

Rubbish. "Intelligent Design" is a marketing ploy for creationism, pure and simple.

Well, they do. But very few people can accept both. People tend to mix them. Science is about the world that human is watching and interpreting, religion is about the human watching the world. The bad mix happened when the concept of science was gradually invented, long after, say Genesis was written. Or after Kalevala was told, as well. After that people started to read Genesis and the other books as science.

A bad mix from the opposite point of view happens, too. People tend to look at nature and find scientifical facts about human and try to legitimate morality aspects based on scientific facts. For instance, some people claim that homosexuality might be due to a genetic anomality and therefore it should be considered a natural acceptable condition. Some claim that homosexuality is due to some psychological trauma in the childhood and therefore it should be treated with therapy. Well, I believe homosexuality in some cases might be due to genetics, in some other cases to environmental factors. Either way, you can't legitimate homosexuality based on that. You have to legitimate it based on other things, like what is the real meaning of two people sharing their lives together and how do they fit in the human community.

Please don't continue on this gay topic in this thread. Feel free to start a new thread instead. My point was only that you shouldn't shoot down scientifical theories (like Darwin) with religious reasons. And you shouldn't shoot down the meaning of religion with non-antropocentric scientifical arguments.

Evolution is about nature, based purely on nature studies.
Intelligent design theory is not quite the same thing. It includes the religious reason. At least it attracts people because of their religious reasons, not because the theory's scientifical values.

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Right, because the leprechauns did some good work in creating the concept of science and in that concept, the concept of ID (which they also created) doesn't fit in.

I don't think that's nescessarily so. It's certainly true of me, but I wouldn't say in general.
There is no problem in asserting that god created the universe and believing in evolution, even without invoking the cludge of intelligent design. The question should not be if god created the universe, but wether the universe can be explained without invoking the intervention of such a being. By the way, I'll be reasoning on the assumption that divine intervention is a scientific proposition that can be analysed and argued for or against. If you don't approve of this approach, don't read on.
For physics and cosmology, I would say that as we learn more about the nature of elementary particles and the universe, it becomes clear that postulating a divine being to explain all things is less and less nescessary. In prehistoric times when man did not understand fire and thunder they were assumed to be devine. Now, god's ability to meddle in human affairs is greatly reduced. For me this is a hint that no god had any say in the creation of the universe.

To evolution and Darwinian evolution. The question is not wether things like speciation exist, because as Darwin argued in his book, this can clearly be seen. If you need further proof, look up the link I posted above about ring species. The question also is not wether selection works because that too can be seen clearly (in a laboratory, breeding for a certain quality) and even understood without trouble. Even that natural selection works in principle should be obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it for a second or two.

The question, then, is if natural selection is sufficient to explain the variety of species we see today.
To the best of my knowledge (I'm not a biologist, and I can only refer to popular literature, for instance Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale and references to original literature therein) current evidence and observations says that it can and earlier claims that the mutation rate is too low are superceded by new measurements.
Intelligent design claims that natural selection is not sufficient and invokes divine intervention to explain the surplus of evolution that natural selection cannot explain.

So, there you have it: a scientifically sound check to test the main premise of intelligent design. Obviously, if it fails the check, well, maybe god made it so that it would. But that line of reasoning is not science.

Intelligent Design is not a theory. I don't think it's even a hypothesis. I'd call it more of an unfounded assumption. If Intelligent Design was a theory, then so would be Intelligent Falling, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, and The Invisible Pink Unicorn.

That is incorrect. Science is quite open to most possibilities; but there exists no evidence that divine intervention has ever taken place. That is why intelligent design is not credible science, and why evolution is. Evolutionists are not automatically assuming it can't be true; they've looked at the evidence for creationism and found it to be nonexistent.