Anytime and always. If you are allowed to postulate incredible or absurd background hypotheses, any evidence can be rendered consistent with any theory.
I am not sure what you mean by “philosophical evidence.” Evidence in philosophy is no different from evidence in science.
Yes, contemporary proponents of ID use bad, falacious arguments that pretend much of the evidence does not exist. The proponents of Evolutionary theory use good, cogent, honest arguments. What is your point?
If you are an intellectually honest Christian (as most 19th century biologists, including Darwin himself, originally, were), it presents you with the dilemma that either your most cherished beliefs about your God (like that He is not crazy or sadistic) are false, or else the current species and their geographical distribution arose via evolution rather than direct creation by God. Most of them chose the second alternative. (Very few educated Christians in Darwin’s time thought the Book of Genesis was literally true anyway, so that was not much of an issue. Biblical literalism is mostly a 20th century American heresy.)
OK, I take it back about proponents of Evolutionary theory using good, honest, cogent arguments. Apparently sometimes they don’t. Declaring something does not make it true. Your “better” argument is almost as weak, dishonest and dumbed down as that of the IDers themselves. Have you noticed how few people (I mean the general public here, not the bigots) are being won over by it? On the other hand, Darwin and his supporters actually did win over most the people who mattered via, in effect, the argument I outlined (admittedly my version is schematic and greatly simplified compared to what was actually said in the 19th century).
With the exception of Lamark’s theory, evolutionary ideas (scarcely theories) that were around before Darwin (such as those of Erasmus Darwin or Robert Chambers) were extremely vague. They amounted to little more than the notion that living things were constantly changing and improving themselves from one generation to another. Lamark’s theory had more to it, but, unlike Darwin, he still thought each species has a separate origin (presumably creation by God, although I am not sure if he was explicit about that). Lamarkian evolution has each species beginning as a very primitive organism and evolving over time into something more complex. This solves the extinction problem (for Lamark, no species ever went extinct, the fossils we find are just earlier stages of species that are still around) but it does not solve the geographical distribution problem that led Darwin (and Wallace) to embrace evolution.
Not really. God is supposed to be omniscient after all. If he creates a species that He knows is going to go extinct, isn’t that still a screw up?
Yes, you are quite right that contemporary creationism arose in the 20th century, as essentially a political and pseudo-religious movement, long after the scientific argument for evolution had been won. However, an argument that is formally almost exactly the same as that made by modern IDers was extremely influential in the 18th and 19th century before Darwin. Back then they called it Natural Theology. Paradoxically it inspired much of the biological research that eventually led to the establishment of evolution. The idea was that the more you discovered about the complexity of organisms and their adaptation to their environment, the more you would be demonstrating the reality, power and goodness of God, so biological research became a sort of worship. Darwin’s own interest in biology was, originally, at least partly inspired by this tradition. Of course the facts he discovered led him to evolution, and his evolution theory completely undermined the Natural Theology argument by showing that God was not the best explanation for the biological facts after all. It was people’s attachment to Natural Theology (not Biblical literalism) that accounts for most of the Christian resistance to Darwinism in the 19th century, but since, for the most part, the arguments were conducted in an intellectually honest way, evolutionary theory won out.
Basically yes, although ID people generally dishonestly deny that God is an axiom for them. The greater dishonesty, however, is simply that they refuse to consider most of the evidence (and continue to make fallacious arguments even after the fallacy has been clearly demonstrated to them).
Nineteenth century creationism was science, in the sense that it was an honest attempt to understand the world using the best evidence and intellectual tools available. It was abandoned when evidence turned up that it could not account for came along, and then a better theory that could account for that evidence. Such is scientific progress. Twentieth and 21st century ID and creationism is a political-cum-religious movement (in my view the real motivation is reactionary politics, for which religion is just a tool to stop people thinking) that denies the facts and twists arguments to serve its predetermined ends.
I ought to stop, though, as this has become a terrible hijack of a thread that is supposed to be about parallel universes.
I am sure that having an explanation in Natural selection helped the acceptance of Darwin’s ideas a lot, but it is a separate issue from the branching pattern of evolution that explains the geographical distribution of species problem. In fact, by the end of the 19th century, although most biologists fully accepted Darwinian style branching evolution (for the reasons I have already explained), they did not accept that it had mainly come about by Natural Selection. There were quite good scientific reasons for these doubts about Natural Selection, and even Darwin himself had his doubts about it toward the end of his life, as is evidenced by his revisions to later editions of The Origin of Species. Natural selection was not ruled out altogether, but most thought it was not enough, and needed to be supplemented by other mechanisms, such as Lamark-style inheritance of acquired characteristics, or perhaps other yet undiscovered processes, in order to explain the full range of biological diversity.
It was not until Mendelian genetics was rediscovered in the early 20th century that it became apparent both that Natural Selection was adequate to the task after all, and that the Lamarkian mechanism would not work.
So, scientists could, and did, accept that the evidence showed that Darwin-style branching evolution was real quite regardless of their views as to whether it had been caused by natural selection. Indeed, as I mentioned, Darwin himself realized that species must have arisen by evolution some years before he figured out Natural Selection as a mechanism to account for it. He actually made two major discoveries, not just one.
Notably, the MWI fits this analysis as well (questions of motivation aside). It is a priori unobservable. It may be true, and it may be the most elegant way to make the numbers work out in quantum mechanics, but belief in its truth is necessarily an act of faith.