"From where I am standing the idea of special creation looks as quaint as the idea that God directly manipulates the weather."
We will carry this (endless) conversation on another time. Until then, enjoy the Spring weather an oh, please do not get hit by lightning!
Your brilliant pool of knowledge on this subject is quite fascinating and you should debate openly, perhaps at a college.
Next to the working scientists that post on FR (and there a quite a few on PatrickHenry's pinglist) I know nothing. Just a college degree in engineering, and a lifelong interest in science. My knowledge is wider than most but shallow.
The problem with debating this stuff face to face (in front of a unscientifically trained audience) is that it only takes a couple of minutes to make 20 bogus claims (of the type that websites like DrDino is overloaded). To refute those claims takes potentially hours for each one, during which the audience has to be educated to understand concepts that are normally the province of science PhDs. Who is an audience going to believe? Than man with lots of 15 second soundbites that confirm their religious predispositions, or the man with lots of $20 words who has real difficulty getting his arguments across at a level that they can comprehend?
Science already debates all this stuff exhaustively, though evolution is supported by so much evidence and data and has suggested so many fruitful lines of enquiry that serious debate about whether it occurs ended about 120 years ago within the scientific community. The final nails were slammed into the coffin of scientific evolutionary resistance by the genomic evidence that has come in over the last ten years. There is still loads and loads of debate about precise mechanisms of evolution however.