PBS' Nova had a fantastic documentary last week, "Intelligent Design on Trial," on the recent Dover, PA trial over teaching evolution in high school, and the science behind it. The whole program, divided into 12 chapters, is online. I particularly liked the chapters discussing (and refuting) the idea of "irreducible complexity" and the canard that evolution is "just a theory," not a "fact." Quoting from a re-enacted trial scene:

To say it's just a theory is really a bit insulting to science, because in science, a theory holds more weight than just a fact does. ...

A theory is not just something that we think of in the middle of the night after too much coffee and not enough sleep. That's an idea. A theory, in science, means a large body of information that's withstood a lot of testing. It probably consists of a number of different hypotheses, many different lines of evidence. Gravitation is a theory that's unlikely to be falsified even if we saw something fall up. It might make us wonder, but we'd try to figure out what was happening rather than immediately just dismiss gravitation. ...

Facts are just the minutiae of science. By themselves, they can be right or wrong. But, a theory is something that has been tested and tested over and over again, built on, revised. It continues to be reworked and revised. ...

No theory in science, no theory is ever regarded as absolute truth. We don't regard atomic theory as truth. We don't regard the germ theory of disease as truth. We don't regard the theory of friction as truth. We regard all of these theories as well-supported testable explanations that provide natural explanations for natural phenomena.

If a doctor prescribes medication for a religious patient's infectious disease, and the patient objected on the grounds that germs are "just a theory" and really God made him sick, the patient would be considered a nut. But it's still fashionable to express that kind of gut indignation towards the theory of evolution. The Bible says God is the creator - end of story - and anything that suggests man is not a spontaneous, divine creation must therefore insult human dignity and be wrong. That's really what the Dover creationists' argument boiled down to. "Evolution must be wrong" is not their conclusion, it's their premise - so all the experimental data in the world isn't going to convince them. Scientists could synthesize life from scratch in a petri dish tomorrow and the creationism/design camp would not be discouraged one bit. (That such an experiment has not yet succeeded, though, is something they're happy to use to support their case.)

The sad part of all this is that really, evolution does not have to nullify their beliefs. Natural selection does not disprove God, it only removes the absolute need for one. It seems to me that a religion premised on "God exists because he can't possibly not exist," while holding your fingers over your ears and shouting blah blah blah to drown out possible objections, has very weak foundations.
I respect the Catholic scientist in the documentary who explained Aquinas' principle that "truth is one": Faith and reason, for a believer, must co-exist. Reason without faith, for a non-believer, is also a valid position, but faith without reason is not. A religious person could, with intellectual honesty, hold that God started or oversees the process of evolution. Maybe God controls gravitation and germs, too. That's not my view, but I respect it as a valid one. There is really no need at all for religion to eliminate science to preserve God's existence.