I've little doubt that someone much more learned than myself will shoot me down in flames, but why should not evolution be the rational, practical, scientific method by which Intelligent Design is achieved?
That's a thoroughly reasonable approach which is exactly the reasoning that the late Pope John Paul applied. IIRC he said something like, "The Bible teaches us how to live, not how life came to exist." An article in the NewScientist suggested that a God who could create a self-sustaining, infinitely-changing universe that ran by itself is far more worthy of worship than a God who's bodged a universe together so badly that it requires continuous modification in order to work! :-)
If you take the old argument of the eye as evidence for ID, you have to accept that the Intelligent Designer did a really stupendously shit job of designing stuff, given that the majority of humans need glasses to see correctly. In other words, the Intelligent Designer is *less* skilled at design than humans! Worthy of worship...? The ID club have abandoned the eye as an example of ID, bcos it's too easy to debunk it with even basic biology skills. They've not given up, they've just gone onto more obscure areas of biology to find their examples. Their arguments are not any better though (and are being debunked by experts in those areas), but it's easier for them to hoodwink the unsuspecting in high scientific flimflam than to use examples that we all have experience of.
I don't have a problem with ID being taught - so long as it's *only* taught in religious studies class. It can share a lesson with the Hindu belief in a flat world riding on the backs of four giant elephants and supported on a turtle, the Genesis view that the world is a giant bubble with water above and water below (the water above is naturally the source of rain), the murderous Greek and Viking creation myths, and so on.
Re the Lamarkian evolution theory, that was diametrically opposite to Darwin's view. Lamark said that you could "want" to achieve certain characteristics and thereby obtain them. That's clearly bollocks - if I jump off a cliff then I splat on the bottom, no matter how strongly I "want" to grow wings! Darwinian evolution says that if you don't get those characteristics then you're more likely to die (or to fail to reproduce, which is the same thing in the long run), so there doesn't need to be any formal strategy. So a long-necked giraffe gets more food than a dozen short-necked ones, and so it'll be the long-necked one who has the extra energy and strength when it comes to competing for females or surviving in a famine/drought. It's not the only solution though - elephants have evolved a different strategy for getting at high leaves (long nose instead of long neck).
science has never been able to create a new species
Define "species". Lions and tigers have been quoted, as have dogs and wolves. Lions and tigers clearly were not created by humans, but there are few people who would disagree that dogs have been bred from domesticated wolves. The range of dogs runs clean from tiny terriers and lapdogs at one end, up to huskies and mountain dogs at the other end which are physically almost indistinguishable from wolves. So mankind *has* created a new species in the domestic dog. This wasn't achieved by recent science, but by the application of science over a long period of time.