I don't mind these threads too much, as long as people keep their cool. If people don't agree with you, then so be it, you can still be confident in where you stand. I don't mind people who disagree with me who've actually thought about it. What is more hard to understand is somebody who has strong opinions, yet are ill-informed.
I happen to be a Christian and believe in Intelligent Design. That does NOT mean that I don't believe in the process of evolution. What has been shown to be true in practice and in the fossil record is that adaptive mutations have occurred within a given species that make that species more reslient in survival. For example the mutations in color, etc. that make better camouflogue, etc.
What eveolution has NOT shown effectively is mutations that have crossed a given species into another species, which is a necessary step for Darwin's theory to work as a model that explains our origins. Thus one can believe that the origin of the universe or the origin of species is a product of some form of intelligent creator and still agree that evolution operates within a given species.
In order to have effective mutations that cross species, there would be an extraordinary of transitionary forms in the fossil record, not what we presently have. It's funny when archeologists find some skeleton (1 out of billions) and trumpet that this "could" be some type of link, and then go on to force it into some model. In order for evolution to have successfully occurred across species, there would be millions upon millions of transitionary forms that "almost" made it, millions that made it, and millions more that further varied across another species. There would be transitionary forms all over the place. The fossil record is laughably incomplete.
On a rational level, the mathematics of genetic mutation and the number of mutations that have to occur make the evolutionary scientist a man of great faith. One could win the powerball lottery one thousand times in a row with a much greater probability than evolution having occurred from the primordial soup to where we are today. And to say that just give it enough time doesn't fix that... cosmologists say the universe can only be 10 billion years old at most. There simply isn't enough time for it to have occurred.
So, I'll agree that Darwin's theory is at least a good model to attempt to explain the origins of species. But after 150 years of research of the fossil record, the large data sets that have been collected do not support the model too well.
Look at the elegance of Maxwell's equations, Newton's laws of graviity, and the amazing building blocks of sub-atomic physics, and it doesn't take a Jesus freak to conclude that such elegance and beauty belies an intelligent designer. But that's just my two cents.
