First let me say that I am not an ID advocate (polar opposite) but the questions you have have straight forward answers.
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I would like to know what is really ID.
Its a political movement originally created by lawyers and marginally scientifically literate people to mask creationism from legal sanction in the public school systems. It is claimed the be a theory with scientific standing that should be taught in schools on an equal footing with "alternative theories". There is no substantiation whatsoever for this claim as will be made clear in the answers that follow.
The closest thing to a position that ID takes is "there is evidence of design in nature". This is supported by the claim that there are existing mechanisms in nature that are "irreducibly complex" (which directly means that they could not have evolved from prior forms.)
Anyone versed in basic scientific philosophy understands immediately that this is not science. Its an attempt to sound like science via a meta-discussion of science. The existence of evidence for something is not itself science -- that's just partial *support* for what really is science. Furthermore, *positive* evidence is not what constitutes modern science -- surviving a lot of *negative* tests is what constitutes modern science (aka "falsifiability".)
Furthermore proving that something cannot have been evolved or reduced has no way of being satisfied from a scientific point of view (unless they start violating other basic laws of physics, like conservation of energy, in which case yes you could throw out evolution and a lot of other things too -- there are "free energy" people who have plenty of mechanical examples, which will be submitted to scientific review "real soon now"). Because even in ideal cases, it could never be differentiated from organisms that we just don't yet know how they evolved (but nevertheless did).
For any thing to be considered a scientific theory it must present resultant principles which are falsifiable. ID presents no such thing. When challenged on this ID advocate Stephen Meyer claimed that if the entire tree of life is definitively and exhaustively proven to be evolved, then ID would be falsified. This is what I call "you fail at science". The word falsifiable contains the word "ABLE" in it for a reason. The whole point of being falsifiable is to challenge the world to test the theory over and over in many many uncontrolled configurations and to challenge it with very similar theories which might attempt to explain observations more clearly. The validity of a scientific theory is measured precisely by the amount/quality of independent negative testing it has endured (unscathed of course).
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By that, I mean for ID:
-what is the age of the earth?
ID is not a theory and has no basic scientific principles. That means it has no ability or capacity to predict anything. For example, suggesting that earth is a nearly perfect sphere might satisfy their position that that looks like design, but it doesn't tell us didly squat about any other properites of the earth, nor does it make any predictions. No age of the earth could be inconsistent with ID (even 2 seconds old works, because a creator could create designed memories and other world state).
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-what did the designer create? (species? genus? familiy?)
The ID adage only tells us that things look like they are designed. The inference that there was a designer is intrinsically flawed, as it specifically ignores any other explanation for why things look designed (like the fact that the *lookers* are pattern seeking entities who, in modern times, tend to see a lot of human-designed things around them, and have an ability and tendency to extrapolate).
But worse yet, even if we were to give them their flawed inference that there was a designer, we still can't tell the difference between things that coincidentally look designed but aren't versus those things that truly are. That's what it means to be untestable. So at the very best (for IDers) one can only specify candidates for things that might be designed by a designer.
The ID advocate Michael Behe at one point has suggested that the Bacteria Flagellum, and the blood clotting mechanism were such candidates. Both were supposedly examples of irreducible complexity. Unfortunately for IDers the first was shown to be obviously evolved, and the second is known to be reducible in literature that predates Behe's claim.
The ID idea does not give you a way of knowing that any particular example is truly an example of what they are talking about or not. Each example, at best, is a tentative example just waiting to be shown to be reducible or evolved.
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-when did he create life?
You are anthropomorphisizing the creator. While all IDers do this internally, they don't do so publically. So limiting to their claims of what ID is, there is no "he" who created/designed. Just a "designer" for which something like a gender might not apply.
But again, clearly, ID has no way of pinning down a date for something. There are no principles or evidence that could be built from knowing that something was designed that could tell you when it was designed. The designer didn't date its work. ID could at best have to accept geological and fossil evidence, which puts it out of the scope of ID.
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-I would also like to know if possible, what are the observations that lead to your answers.
I don't know of any surviving examples. They have often put forward the mouse-trap, as an analogy as if that was good enough, and ignore the fact that mouse traps are neither alive nor self-reproducing, or that small wood planks can be used for making matchsticks or that springs can be used as door hinges or that metal wire could be used for coat hangers.
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Of course feel free to give more detail if you have them.
I ask because most IDers say ID is a theory so it would be nice to know what we are talking about before arguing about the evidence.
Well we wouldn't want to over-burden them by forcing them to repeat what they have already written. So a summary of the peer reviewed scientific papers with citations of which journals they were published in would be plenty sufficient. (I know of none.)
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All talks about evidence or evolution (like ID says this because evo can't explain it) SHOULD BE TAKEN TO ANOTHER thread.
One does not need to discuss evolution to know what ID is all about. However, I don't understand why discussion of evidence should be sanctioned.
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