The argument against Intelligent Design isn't that it's not possible, it's that there isn't any supporting evidence for it. The context is a neutral universe, in the sense that the chemical mix of the sea is a neutral medium for the life that's in it.
The logic of ID gets stacked on some shaky to non-existent premises, primary being the complexity of things like the mammalian eye, or the way things in the living biota fit together. That these intricate phenomena couldn't be produced accidentally.
This is refuted easily and with a great deal of irritation by the champions of rationalism, sometimes known as rational-positivists.
There's an assumed context there as well, of a neutral intellectual medium out of which the arguments emerge. That's provably false, the intellectual context of the present came right out of centuries of tightly-controlled archiving and dissemination of knowledge. Galileo and Copernicus being only the most prominent figures to have their work and discoveries hushed up and tucked away. It's not scientific to presume about these things but I think it's safe to say there were others we don't even have a record of, and with that there's a kind of catalog of the possible that was never made - those who didn't even get far enough to be censored and condemned, because of the intellectual climate of their time.
So current understanding and knowledge are not only partial as a result of the step-by-step progress of human learning proceeding from ignorance and superstition, but partial as a result of the at least sporadic if not continuous agenda-biased selection of knowledge and censoring of its discoverers.
The assumption that idea creates generally is that anything that contradicted church dogma would have been suppressed - a fairly black-and-white process, but it doesn't seem too farfetched to consider that there may have been a more complicated handicapping of human intellectual progress, at least within the last say thousand years.
But for that to be accurate enough to accept we'd have to have an accurate picture of the censoring institutions, and we don't.
We know the Roman Empire collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, and we know the Christian Church by the end of that millennium was essentially the sole repository of what little scientific records there were. That makes it logical to assume that the passage of archived knowledge was filtered by social chaos and the abilities of the monks and a few others who managed to preserve some books and documents.
After that it was the Church's responsibility, and prerogative, to decide what was acceptable and retained and what wasn't.
Until the Enlightenment, which is why that time is looked to as the true beginning of modern science, when the decentralized, lateral accumulation of knowledge made possible an exponential and exponentially-increasing gathering of scientific facts, provable and demonstrable, by reproducible experiments.
It goes directly against the scientific method to assert the unprovable as fact, that's the heart of the argument against creationism. But I'm saying there's likely to be something a little less like incompetence and a lot more like intentional control behind the constriction of progress around morally important knowledge like the origin of life and the greater context in which life is lived. I can't prove it, but I think that's what's happened.
The first place I'm diverging from the scientific consensus is the neutral background assumption.
Starting from that given, that we have these complex minds, and given all the other wonders and beauties of organic life, and the so-far undisproven assertion that it all rose up out of the flux of matter, by accident or inevitably but without intention - how preposterous is it to say that on an infinite scale both spatial and temporal, which is the context here, the true context, the actual background against which we have existence; given also that every aspect of this local complexity is driven by a minute and relatively trivial amount of solar radiation falling on this one small planet from one small star out of the billions and billions we know exist in this one locality, that the unimaginable amounts of energy in play in that greater, infinite context might have given rise, I want to say must have given rise, to something we might as well call divine, whether or not it has any of the attributes our religions accord it.
This has no direct bearing for or against the tenets of organized religion, but it should have a modulating influence on the unspoken but tacit assumption in the scientific view of human centrality in what is without proof taken to be an empty and essentially lifeless void. Because at the same time science seems to be offering the prospect of our being here within an expanse that makes us less than fleas in an ocean of matter billions of light years across, it doesn't refute the permissive nature of isolation in that view. If there's no one here but us, no one more important than us, then whatever we say and whatever we do is valanced only against our own intention and desire.
It's an error of perspective I think, the magnitude into which our instruments and conjectures are proceeding like Xeno's arrow, proceeding into what can only be known piece by piece and step by step, but is already there complete and whole, and as big as everything, because it is everything. All the confident and almost smirking announcements of limits revealed, quarks or muons or some new next thing below and within them, and then the flexible vague reconfigurings of plasma and string at the outer macro-boundaries of the tangible, but in all of it the laborers at discovery unable, forbidden really, to speak of the limitlessness inherent in these simple but not nearly as substantial and permanent, and nowhere near as universal as we've led ourselves, or been led to assume, vertices of time and space.
It looks more and more to me to be likely that there has been a concerted and intentional effort to keep the freshly wondering mind convinced of its insignificance and at the same time convinced of its isolation, so that the self is confirmed as all - that we're here, and that here is nothing without us in it.
An apotheosis of the self.
It seems obvious that what we experience as time and space are local phenomena, real but not complete, and more a function of our presence and passage through them than fundamental attributes of what it is we live within. That way of describing it leaves out what must be an infinite reach of complexity within us as well, but the language and the traditional descriptions make it hard to phrase that inclusively without a lot of writing around the idea.
A simplified version would be that if the argument against creationism is that the random coming-together of molecules over time is all the explanation we need for the complexity and beauty of the life we know is here, that we live, then it's almost inevitable given the infinitely greater amounts of those ingredients - raw matter and time - in the universe, and the universe of universes and so on infinitely out and in, that something equal to its scale would arise. Infinite and eternal.
Science is held to the known and the knowable - by its nature it will never be complete. But what it seeks to know is already complete. Everything, whatever it is, is already there. Here.
The real task of religion is not control and a kind of domestication of its congregations but conversation, communion, with what that is.

Walt-
I'm going to try to append this to the comments thread at CT that ended before I could reply to your last response - because it's important I think to get this idea out.
I'm linking in to your math site in hopes you'll find this.
Simplifying the elements that seem most urgently in need of clarifying, starting from the observer, the "us", the thing that receives the messages of science and the dogma of religion and the various communications that we call art.
Making that a single person, a man. He's standing at the edge of the unknown. For a long time in our history that was a relatively common experience. We moved from known familiar territory into the unknown in a geographical sense quite often. It was still happening regularly in the 19th century, though not as profoundly and frequently as 10,000 years ago.
What's important about that image is the things inside the man, his attitude not least among them, but also what was behind him as he looked out, what he knew or thought he knew about where he'd been born and lived so far, and especially what was back there as he began to move into or toward that unknown.
That's what we're doing right? Not just looking, with our instruments and theoretical formulae, we're going there. We're reaching into the web of genetic material that's held together for us all this time, inside which we came up from insignificance to our present dominance. And we're sending machines out into the territories beyond the solar system, with the hope that someday we'll send men and women out there too.
So here he is, that man, maybe back in the Pleistocene, looking out at the unknown, and beginning to move toward it, into it.
What I was trying to pin over at CT was the vital importance of attitude, how what happens next comes right out of that, whether it's reverence or fear or arrogance or gentle curiosity, or all combined.
I kept thinking I'd made that clear, but I guess not.
Cartesian science, for lack of a more accurate descriptor, proceeds from cogito ergo sum out toward the boundaries of the knowable. And one of the main benefits to us from that stripped-down perception is that our pictures of where we are and what we are have been freed of many illusionary and false attributes.
But the crucial aspect of that Cartesian movement is it begins in the self. So everything that's gained has to come directly from something previously gained. There's a close approximation of Xeno's paradox in that, when what we move toward and into is infinite.
What religion is charged with is communication with what's already out there. To a scientist that's dangerously presumptive. But then you keep saying science is just one discipline of the many in the human endeavor. Not "in charge", as it were.
We aren't all scientists all the time, so that shouldn't be a problem. But we're talking about a view of things that isn't intuitive anymore, so we need reliable tools.
The sun and the moon both occupy a visual arc of around .5 degrees in the sky, intuitively they're the same size, and both circle the earth. You can see this with the naked eye.
Science, and mathematics, have shown us that's is far from accurate. Still it's pretty understandable that for most of our history we were under the impression they had more in common than they do.
The intuitive picture is they're the same, the actual is they're not.
So we have to rely on something besides the intuitive for an accurate picture of where we are. What?
If you read what I was saying carefully you'd see a plea for science and religion, for something that's both; that we had that once and it served us well, though it's scorned now as riddled with superstition and fatal inaccuracy. We learned to make fire and boil grains, and to respect the things that fed us their lives - and those weren't separate ways of being in the world. Religion and science were part of something larger and whole.
Where did that respect go? It was thrown away as a direct result of a change in attitude that was a direct result of a still-partial but more accurate understanding of where we are and how things work.
The respect for life and all that comes from that respect was driven out, and a smug scorn for the primitive welcomed in.
The problem I have with that scorn is that it was coming from genocidal monsters. I'm sorry if that's inflammatory, but there it is. The same guys who taught me to laugh at the mumbo-jumbo animism of the primitive tribesmen had slaughtered them mercilessly and stolen their land almost everywhere they found them.
They had an attitude, just as we have an attitude, toward what they found when they entered the unknown. Just as the man in the paradigmatic example above has an attitude.
What shapes that attitude now?
Science separated from religion, religion separate from science. As research fields, as activities, even as individual beliefs there's no huge problem, it's actually a very positive human method, and biological advantageous really, to atomize and spread the load, so that the newer has a better chance of gaining ground against the old. Mutation and reproduction - that's elementary Darwinian evolution right there.
Maybe that's what makes this seem so crucial, because the cohesion of belief, the linking of minds and attitudes that make us as much one thing as a collection of many is just as important to what it is to be human as diversity is.
The balance between atomization and a unified collective presence.
At some point that early man when he's moving into the unknown territory has to gamble on whether or not there's something out there that he hasn't seen before. Too much caution and he won't make much progress, too little and he'll be exposed. To what?
Well that's kind of the riddle, and I'm advocating for that riddle.
But I'm also trying to keep the idea that there may be something out there already, much bigger than us in ways we can't match to the template of things we've already seen, that's alive - or what we would call alive. Present, existant, being.
What I see as a real danger in the absurd waste of better-spent time that the ID debate consumes is not the resolving of the polarity to the obviously more accurate Darwinian side, but that polarity bringing along with it a whole bunch of more subtle assumptions about things - and them getting confirmed as well.
Because Jerry Falwell has his head up his ass, because the Pope has to back and fill about almost everything that was once enforceable Church dogma - that doesn't mean we're alone in the void.
It doesn't say anything about that idea.
But to the public mind, and as you call it the hearts and minds of men, it says there isn't anything out there.
Decisions will follow from that attitude and they'll shape what we become, or even whether or not we're here at all.
Accurate science doesn't talk about whether or not there's something greater, a structure and organization in which whole universes fit, a place in the sub-muon realities where things get animate again, because it hasn't got there yet. That's the humility of science.
Fine okay, but we're like that guy in the Pleistocene, moving into the unknown. Our attitude's going to shape how we move, where we go, what we do.
And all I was really saying, if it could be reduced to a few words, is we should be very careful about throwing out the humility of religion along with its encrusted dogmatic nonsense, as we move further into the unknown.