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Well Ilkidarios, I am reminded of two quotes:
"In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages." - Lewis Thomas
"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." - Stephen Jay Gould
However, Dragon Master's statement is the key. ID says 'evolution happens, but something 'guides' it'. The silly thing about this is that it you still have to explain where that 'thing' came from. If it was space aliens, then how did 'they' become able to 'guide' life? The inevitably answer is still going to be God, but not one that is all powerful, but one that created some life, which then created more, that then created something else, etc., while God was on lunch break. Its infinitely recursive, right back to the formation of the first planet actually capable of 'maybe' having life. And, its a pointless complication. Fossil records will 'never' likely be comeplete. Too many geological events have happened that would have destroyed the majority of them. Your right that anyhing can be a 'theory', but we have to limit the theories to ones that have evidence to support them. There are several hundred myths, besides the Christian one, which describe how things where 'created', there are additional stories, many similar to ID that describe how it all could have been created. Any crackpot can come up with a 'theory' about how things work, but a science class is about what we have "provisional assent" to, not 'any' and 'every' theory someone else comes up with. If we had to teach every theory someone comes up with for every bit of science that is 'imperfect' and therefor not 100% proven, we would spend 7 hours out of every 8 hour school day just learning about all the 'alternative' theories various people now have, did have or invent while in the classroom for every single subject in science.
Let me repeat that, science classes are about what the majority of scientists who are involved with a subject have provisionally assented to as the most likely answer. And by provisional assent, they mean that they accept it as the most 'likely' explaination so far, given all of the evidence so far, and that such assent will be given up if evidence arises to suggest that the present theory is invalid, while an alternative better represents what the evidence suggests. Evolution has undergone multiple adjustments and modification to provide more accurate theories about specifics, but the general concept is still sound, much like how Newtonian physicals 'still' applies in simple systems where absolute precision is not needed, but has been otherwise superseded by Einsteins theories and those will probably be adjusted or replaced with something even more accurate.
The only possible reason for teaching ID in a school is if you want to permanently discredit it. However, given that ID proponents would be providing the details of 'how' it should be taught and thus how evolution itself would be, the result is an even more serious failure at teaching what nearly 'all' biologists assent to as valid, in trade for someone basically asking, "What if something else did it?" Of course the joke here is that Avida already proved that once life in 'any' form starts to evolve at all, any 'creator' would lose all capacity to guide or control it. At best such a creator would have lost complete control over the situation the instant they so much as dropped the first microbe on the planet.
As for the supposed claim that evolutionists believe that their theory is an absolute. What part of "It has changed multiple times since first proposed", and, "provisional consent", do you not understand. The simple truth is that the **only** people claiming that evolution proponents are inflexible, unable to see the gaps in their ideas, or close minded are those trying to get creationism taught in schools. Even the Catholic Church has dropped the issue and accepted that evolution is the most likely answer to how life came to be how it is and that they all must have had a common decent. The 'only' exception they insist on making is claiming that 'man' was specially created 'after'. As Dragon Master points out, if ID's 'only' argument was that something might have 'started' life on earth, then let it evolve on its own, there would be no point whatsoever of even mentioning it in a class, since while there are some theories about how life 'may' have started, evolutions main focus is on everything that happens once life already exists. (At least until they can show life simply starting up.) ID goes beyond that though and tries to claim that specific structure where 'designed' and that some force 'guides' the process. There is no evidence of this and 'all' existing evidence suggests that it is not only unnecessary, but that while complex those structurs can arise without guidence and show precisely the sort of flaws, errors, inefficiencies and mistakes that 'only' happen due to random chance.
Its no more reasonable to teach ID as an alternative in a science class than to teach that storks deliver babies, Santa Claus has a shop at the north pole, that gravity is really millions of tiny demons holding onto out feet, or that the entire universe came about through the pagan legend of a lonely female diety, who split off a part of herself, which became different (male), then sped off away from her, thus becoming 'our' universe. Science requires a reason to believe that a theory may be true, before it can consider it, otherwise its nothing more than fiction. The problem in this case being that there is evidence to completely disprove 'all' of IDs assertions and 'none' to support them. The reason why you keep hearing about scientists being closed minded is simply because they get seriously ****ed off at every nut on the planet, who knows absolutely nothing about the science, trying to shove undefensible philisophical nonsense into science with the claim, "But I have this theory!"
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