First it depends on your view of Intelligent Design. While it has been used primarily to introduce religion into the school systems via psuedo-science. While some have used it as a repackaged creationism, the actual idea behind intelligent design is that there are many factors seen in nature such as boltzman's constant, that inherently defy any explaination beyond that of a designer or infinite universes. Taken apart from current events, I would have said that intelligent design should not be taught in science and is strictly a philosophical viewpoint. Unfortunately, physicists like to pretend like the philosophy that they do is actually science. Because of this, some physicists have posited the infinite universes idea. Like intelligent design, this idea has no method by which to test it and is completely unfalsifiable. It is, however, considered science, wherein lies the problem. While both the infinite universe or multi-verse idea and Intelligent design are unfalsifiable and have no supporting scientific evidence, Intelligent design at least has some backing in the realm of experiences in the human condition. Therefore it would seem to me that Intelligent design is superior. That being said, you either teach neither or you teach both views. I would prefer treaching both in philosophy class.
The only thing I see in common with the debate that you mention is that once again physicists take entirely too many liberties with what constitutes evidence. The entirety of this debate has to do with idiots proclaiming assinine viewpoints like evolution disproves God. That's ridiculous. Nothing within science either diproves or proves the existence of God. Science is nothing more than the study of naturally occurring phenomenon via natural explanations. It is not truth, but simply one way to study and find truth. In much the same way physicists today have shown that man may have caused up to 0.4 degree of warming from 1950 to 2006, but when they claim that this means that the earth will warm by 7 degrees in the next 100 years, and pretend like this is a fact, they have demonstrated a lack of scientific understanding or absurd arrogance. Furhter, when AGWers call us "deniers" because we "deny the future" as if the future can be easily foretold by tarot cards or computer models, they too demonstrate their lack of scientific understanding or absurd arrogance.
As for Evolution, I think it is on the right track and that at some point a better explanation will come that also uses a survival of the fittest and explains some of the problems still seen in the precambrian explosion and such. The great thing about the creationists, that nobody tends to recognize, is that they keep the evolutionists honest. I disagree with their viewpoints, but there are a tremendous amount of holes in fossil record. There are some glaring problems with evolution that has caused some other theories like punctuated equilibrium to become popular. I wonder if the evolutionists would be so diligent in their research if they did not beleive that some creationists would come and try to poke as many holes in their theories as possible? As for their viewpoint on abiogenesis, I agree, we have nothing but a hodge-podge of hypotheses that all have inherent weakness that can not be easily explained away, not to mention the fact that we ahve no evidence that any of them actually could occur, let alone has occurred. Such a monstrocity should not be taught to children, evolution, has much more support, is actually a theory and should be taught to children.
It should also be noted, that for the pautry amount of money that goes into the Creation museum and such, they do an amazing job of finding every issue with evolution. If our governemnt worked that efficiently, we would have no debt.
One other thing to note is that everything seems to have an antithesis. For example, we have a lot of ignorant posters here that seem to think that science has"proven" everything and that their viewpoints are right and all others are stupid. The truth that they lack the very understanding of the science that they worship is matched nicely with the bible thumpers and other religious zealots. They to think that all other viewpoints are stupid, they to lack the simple understanding of their own religion that teaches judge not lest ye be judged and love. In much the same way people like you have an antithesis. While you pretend to understand science and have a "consensus", the ideas that you endorse are much more alarmist than the general "consensus". The other AGWers who act as if the world and mankind will end have to have and antithesis of the world not ending and CO2 causing no problems at all or helping the world. Such is life. The fact that both sides are wrong never seems to occur to those debating.
Jeff M,
First I agree about punctuated equilibrium, the point being that evolution as a theory has much fine-tuning left to do and until the fine-tuning is done, it will not be a complete theory in that it is currently rather useless for prediction purposes, the punctuated equilibrium is more of a fine tuning of the theory than an overall change, but to look at evolution as complete would just be fool-hardy. Just as Einstein correction to the TOG was not a complete ditching of Newton's TOG, but a fine-tuning.
As for the other statement of having created the basic building blocks of life (amino acids and sugars) is true, But one should realize how little that actually means. First the lab set up made use of cold trapping, something you would never see in nature. Second, while it was a step towards understanding the process, it was a small step. Amino acids and sugars being the building blocks of life are like saying that steel and wood are the building blocks of the empire state building. Its all well and good for a start, but frequently I find the claim to understanding and victory to be foolish. The point is, that we do not traditionally teach hypotheses to children. Now miller's experiment could be the first step towards understanding or it could be a step in the wrong direction. It could be that the environment he used was entirely wrong and while they continue to try to tweak that environment, they lose sight of other possibilities. So don't teach it yet, at least not until college. Then we can save ourselves the pain of arguing with the creationists and have more time to teach scientific principles that have been missing in classes.
Jeff M,
I have read those experiments, the most notable was a retooling of Miller-uley experiment that showed more amino acids created. There ahve been other methods used to obtain amino acids, but as far as I know, the general set-up of miller-uley has produced the most. Talkorigins is an ok site, but they overstate their case, most notably, the statistics article by Ian Musgrave was a travesty. I emailed him, for clarification on the many seeming errors in his article and have yet to see a response.