Opponents of Intelligent Design (ID) often conflate ID with Creationism, perhaps because it confuses the public and enables ID's critics to make the claim that ID is a religious effort and not a scientific enterprise. The conflation is intellectually irresponsible because those who seek to identify ID with Creationism know, or should know, that they're not the same thing.
Creationists, particularly young earth creationists, use a literal reading of the first eleven chapters of the Bible as the interpretive grid which they impose upon the empirical evidence that scientists have uncovered.
ID proponents, on the other hand, base their arguments entirely upon science and philosophy and make no reference to the Bible or any religious text. They argue that the evidence scientists have discovered is best explained in terms of intelligent agency and very poorly explained in terms of purely natural processes and forces.
Whether ID is right or wrong is a question for scientists and philosophers to decide. It's not a religious or theological question.
Those who seek to obfuscate the difference between Creationism and ID either aren't being honest or haven't read any of the substantial corpus of work published by proponents of ID over the last three decades.
One of the most compelling ID proponents on the contemporary scene is philosopher of science Stephen Meyer whose books, Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis each make a case for the proposition that the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, and the infusion of new information necessary for the diversification of body plans during the Cambrian period, taken together make a powerful case for the conclusion that life and the universe were intentionally engineered by an intelligent mind.
Now it's certainly the case that ID has implications for one's metaphysical convictions, but that should hardly disqualify ID from competing in the scientific arena with naturalistic explanations, since naturalistic accounts also have their own metaphysical implications.
In the following seven minute video Meyer discusses the metaphysical implications he sees resulting from the superior explanatory power of ID. He summarizes the argument against naturalistic explanations for the origin of life, the origin of the cosmos and cosmic fine-tuning and concludes that the scientific evidence points to a transcendent intelligent creator.
For a much fuller presentation of these arguments check out his book Return of the God Hypothesis, a book that I think would convince anyone whose mind was not already a priori opposed to Meyer's conclusion.
