Any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.

Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him.

There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.

The young earth-solution to reconciling the order of creation with natural history makes good exegetical and theological sense. Indeed, the overwhelming consensus of theologians up through the Reformation held to this view. I myself would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it.

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.