Dear Blacknad,
My experience in debating this subject for more than 20 years now is that generally speaking, no matter what you say, it will be ignored. Also, a common technique used by IDers and other creationists is to make an argument in the most arcane subject, feeling that no one listening would be smart enough or know enough to refute what they know to begin with.
In this particular case, he hasn't actually made an argument. He has accused the author of the story of having made up fairy stories and so forth and of using rhetorical techniques in place of reasoning. If you can't see that anyman himself was using exactly those techniques then I don't know what to say to you.
There are assumptions in any field of science - we call them laws or facts. The problem is that he's using a comic book understanding of the subject matter to criticize people who know a lot more than he does about it.
A good understanding of the entire 'debate' can be had by considering a single event in the recent Dover case. One of the witnesses for the school board, someone who was promoting ID in the schools and the downplaying of evolution education, was asked a question and then admitted that he hadn't actually read the standard that the school board was planning to adopt. Then one of the boardmembers complained about the length of the standard and admitted that she, too, had not read it.
That pretty much summarizes the last 150 years of debate on the subject.
