But since we have no evidence abiogenesis or spontaneous generation actually taking place in a lab, why not keep minds open?
Because we do have evidence towards those things. The fact that basic organic chemicals can be synthesized using inorganic, natural processes is evidence towards abiogenesis. And it's significantly more evidence than anything that is avaliable for ID.
It's possible that an intelligent designer did this and I believe evident by all of the informed laws that govern the universe.
That's not the conjecture of "intelligent design", though. If you believe that the laws of physics were "stacked" or frontloaded in order to ensure that evolution was inevitable, then you're an evolutionist, not a creationist. And that's not the position that ID's proponents want to teach in schools.
What they want to teach in schools is that a creator exists who, though smart enough to create the universe
ex nihilo, wasn't
quite smart enough to get it to produce life on its own as a consequence of the laws of physics - wasn't quite smart enough to get the fine-tuning right - and so, had to intervene at various points in history to cause certain details like blood clotting and the bacterial flagellum to evolve.
Is that really the idea of the creator you want children to learn? A god that isn't even smart enough to make evolution work?
I do not think TOE negates the possibility of a creator at all.
Nobody's saying that it does. But the God of intelligent design, of creationism, is not the god that you believe in. The god of ID is a ridiculous contradiction - smart enough to be the creator of the universe, but not quite smart enough to frontload the laws of physics to ensure the development of the bacterial flagellum.
There's no scientific merit to ID. None at all. Should it be researched? ID's proponents can knock themselves out, but they don't. They don't do any research. Until they do they have nothing to put in the schools.
"Teaching the controversy" is only appropriate when there
is a controversy; there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution and so that's the only model that should appear in a science class. We don't teach "flat earth" in geography; we don't teach holocaust denial in history; and ID, lacking as it does any substance, should not be taught in schools, either.