Last night I went to hear William Dembski at Biola where he lectured on intelligent design(id). It was a popular level lecture filled with careful illustrations and a big picture assessment of the id movement. Dembski also made it clear that the problem with Naturalistic Evolution is that it can not and does not account for the specified complexity of the world. Evolution, does (on one level) adequately describe how organisms change over time, but he claims that Naturalistic evolution is too blind to account for the design in the world.
The momentum of skepticism about the adequacy of Naturalistic Evolution is increasing. Dembski cited Robert Laughlin’s book, among several others, to point out the “anti-theory” affect of many evolutionists today. Laughlin, who is clearly an evolutionist, says “it's wrong to use evolution, a theory of origins, to justify monkeying with nature without understanding what you're doing.” Although Laughlin is a supporter of evolution his position is sympathetic toward id when he states in an e-mail to Dembski “that much of modern science isn't objective at all but a belief system in disguise, one that often DOESN'T respect nature, even though it alleges to do so.”
Further, the design work being done has great benefits to other fields that I had not thought of until after hearing Dembski. For example, imagine you are an archeologist (Dr. Dirt) looking for some lost city. Dembski’s work could help you by giving you a design detector that would help you discern which mounds of dirt are built by intelligence (presumably human). In this way Dr. Dirt could save much time and money by digging only the mounds with the highest probability of being part of the lost city.
At the end of the night no one can claim a definitive victory in the intelligent design verses evolution debate. I think the debate should be aired in the world of ideas and may the strongest (assuming the truth is stronger than falsehood) win.
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