I repect a well-thought-out answer which addresses the points raised. I agree with much of what you say here.
I am interested in the question of why each side in this debate sees the other as composed of arrogant fools blinded by prejudice. I suspect the answer is that many of the most vocal are.
The examples of observable evolution in nature which you cite certainly do exist. The question about which reasonable and well-informed persons disagreed is: what is their significance? The Evolutionist believes he is looking at a little piece of a process similiar to that described by Charles Darwin, a process which will in time produces truly radical changes. But, one who suspects the existence of an inteligent creator may see designed-in adaptive mechanisms and feedback loops. As far as I have been able to determine, there is not sufficient scientific evidence to answer this question.
Unfortunately, way the most vocal public advocates of Evolution understand the meaning of the evidence is so shaped by their atheism that they are unable to even parse expressions of doubt. They are so sure that a naturalistic creative mechanism much exist that that naturalistic theory which best fits the evidence is the best theory of all. When some demure, they become angry, make bombastic statements, and launch into wholly ineffective appeals to be rational. This is ineffective because rationality is not the problem, differing assumptions are.
Of course, Creationism has even worse nuts who play right into the hands of the Evolutionist demigogs. Could God have created the fossil record and the light from distant stars? No doubt, if it were absolutely necessary. But since it wasn't necessary, to assert that he did is silly. They should just admit that they misunderstood Genesis.
It seems that for you the word "believe" has some kind of baggage. I assume this is connected with Rationalist rhetoric which contrasts "belief based systems" with "evidence based systems". When I said that I "sincerly believe" I meant that I had come to a conclusion after giving the matter serious attention.
I agree that the real change that occured during the Enlightenment was not that most thinkers were no longer religious. Rather, thinkers began to understand that the world is a machine. This was contrary to the assumptions of many who had supposed that God commanded the flowers to bloom and the lightening to strike.
But, rationalist philosphers liked to tell a different story, suggesting that the universe-is-a-machine view is incompatible with the idea that God interacts with the natural world in any way at any time. I suppose on the background of that culture they may have seemed like opposits, but today, when even the uneducated know that the universe is a machine, such arguments simply puzzle the believer. It is amusing that these worn-out arguments keep getting brought up on Slashdot. ("Please, no devine intervention! I want my universe to stay rational!")
Your remarks on the difference between Creationism and Intelligent Design are insightful. I would expand on them by calling Intelligent Design the bastard child of Rationalism. Rationalist thought places the idea of a creator into a compartment called "faith" or "belief" which exists alongside another compartment called "reason". It is frequently claimed that these compartments represent "different kinds of truth".
The problem with this kind of reasoning is that if the word really was created by an inteligent being, that is an historic fact which nothing can alter. It does not matter what we believe or do not believe about the identity and motivations of that being. It does not matter if we surround belief in this historical fact with the most absurd superstitions imaginable. It does not matter if we believe that it never happened. Our mental state cannot alter history.
Intelligent Design is an attempt to meet Evolutionists on terms which the Evolutionists have themselves chosen. All peripheral assertions which could possibly be superstition or known only by devine revelation are shorn away leaving only the basic premis: the world was created by a superhuman being or beings of extrordinary skill and possessed of extrordinary resources. We then ask, is the question really forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation?