Thanks, Greg.
I’ve now read the book excerpt, and can throw in some remarks for you to take home. They are points that have been covered on this site ad nauseam, so if others here respond to me with their usual arguments, I will just ignore those arguments (I only have so many hundred hours per year to repeat myself).
1-- You move from “neo-Darwinism” in point 1 to “evolution” in point 3, but the term “evolution” is ambiguous, and if used to refer merely to a process of “descent with modification” is not automatically opposed to ID – as has been spelled out many times on the Discovery site, and in Mike Behe’s writings, especially his newest one, Darwin Devolves. For Behe and the ID folks, “neo-Darwinism” is kind of shorthand for “descent with modification driven entirely by unguided, unplanned factors.” It is this which Behe argues is not scientifically tenable, and it is this which many ID writers equate with atheism.
The great clarification which ID potentially offered was to shift the debate from “creation versus evolution” (which had long grown sterile) to “design versus chance” (which was a logically, mathematically, and empirically tractable distinction). Whether particular ID arguments work or not, it is of course fair to debate, but it’s not listening to what ID at its best is saying to pit it against “evolution.” (I add in your defense that, as many ID proponents are also quite vigorous creationists, their expressions often foster the “ID vs. evolution” impression, and to that extent ID as a concept has suffered due to the writings of many of its own proponents. But if you read with discrimination, you will see that the upper tier of ID writers are usually more clear than the second or third-string members of the movement.)
2-- You write:
“As part of their strategy—and partly due to rejection by professional scientists—they promoted their own textbook, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins .”
This has already dealt with in the ENV article. Here the ENV article rebukes you justly. Of Pandas and People was originally published by a different organization, before Discovery was founded. When you speak of “their” strategy, you are speaking of the strategy of some followers of ID who later revised that book, cutting out the language of creationism and inserting the language of intelligent design, to make the book seem less creationist and more scientific, with an eye to getting the book into the public schools. But it was not Discovery Institute that made those changes to the book – it was still published by someone else. And Discovery opposed the school board – Dover – that was trying to impose an ID policy that included that book. Discovery’s position at the time was (and still is) that ID should not be mandated by school boards. Your apparent reliance on the Wikipedia account here betrays you. Discovery people have begged fair-minded opponents not to judge ID theory by either the contents or the politics of the Pandas book, but by the other works I’ve mentioned, and respect for a debating opponent should incline you to do this.
3-- Finally, you raise some potential theological objections to ID. None of the objections you raise are new: they have been floating around since the days of the old ASA discussion list, they continued on BioLogos, and they show up in other places. They have many times been answered by ID proponents. For example, in the writings of ID leader Jay Richards, Roman Catholic and Thomist, and holder of a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion, notably in his God and Evolution, and also in the work Aquinas and Evolution by Michael Chaberek, a Polish Dominican. Scholars on this level certainly understand “dual causation”, as you request. I recommend that you read these works. In any case, questions about the theological adequacy of ID, when they come from the Templeton/BioLogos side, always make me see red, given my lifetime of study of Western Religious Thought; I’ve never seen a higher incidence of theological heresy than among TE/ECs, who flirt with everything from Open Theism to a deeply flawed Bible. Falk, Giberson, Applegate, etc. are not exactly well-trained on questions of divine causality, and they have said things that are ill-advised about providence, omnipotence, etc.
My own theological orientation is Classical-Christian, and my intellectual heroes are people like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, C. S. Lewis, and so on. I don’t identify with either fundamentalism or evangelicalism. If you think of my comments above in this light, the meaning I get out of “intelligent design” may be clearer to you. If I get a chance, I’ll write to you and maybe we can see if we have any theological common ground.