I'm pretty sure that mis-teaching evolutionary theory is the main reason it continues not to be argued.

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-mustread.html is the best resource, and explains evolution far better and in considerably more depth than I ever could. Wikipedia is pretty good too.

But here is a summary of the more common misconceptions.

If any of these surprise you, then the evolution you were arguing against is a strawman, and nobody holds the belief that you were arguing against.

1. Evolution says nothing about cosmology, the big bang, or where the universe, galaxy, solar system, or Earth came from. Evolution is only about life.
2. Evolution says nothing about where life came from! For the debate on that, read up on "abiogenesis".
3. Evolutionary Theory is not accidental or random. Random mutation is not required to be a part of it, and it works just as well without it, in computer simulations with large enough populations. Having two genders helps too.
4. Evolution is not "merely" a theory. This is not just semantics, any more than the theory of gravity is a theory. It is a real, observed phenomenon (a "fact"), and also an explanation for that fact (a "theory") that makes falsifiable predictions which have been tested in the laboratory and found to be true.
5. Random mutation of genes can play a part. There is some debate on how large a part, but in truth it doesn't matter, so long as every time two members of a population combine their genes to make a child, the combined gene of the child is close to unique. We can see this to be the case in reality. Other than ensuring this uniqueness, random mutation is peripheral to evolutionary theory.
6. Evolution does not need to be directed. It may not be accidental or random, but it's also not directed. It's a process, like generating a fractal, which appears to create an intelligent pattern but which on inspection is very simple.
7. Evolution is not progress towards any goal. Yes, I know that means that it's a misnomer. Sorry. Not our fault, blame Darwin, he picked the word.
8. Evolution does not require an increase in complexity. An population can evolve to become simpler - often called "devolve", but that's a misnomer. So snakes and whales lose their legs, cave-fish become blind, etc.
9. Evolution does not need to be slow. Yes I know people keep saying "But... MILLIONS OF YEARS! You don't get that in a jar of peanut butter!" But, no, sorry, not required to observe evolution, though a large number of generations are required for significant changes of shape to be seen, eyes to form, and so forth.
10. Populations, not individuals, evolve; evolution does not describe how a child matures into an adult, or how a tree grows from a seed. A chimp can't be born a chimp and turn into a gorilla. You need at least one generation to observe evolution. To be provable evolution, you need quite a few generations, in order to establish that the changes remain in subsequent generations.
11. Populations, not individuals, evolve; you need the entirety of a population to observe evolution. You need some of them to breed, and some not to, so that the selective forces can do their job.
12. Evolution does posit "transitional forms"... but not "endpoint forms". That is, every animal, plant, fossil that exists, is an example of a transitional form. Evolution is a constant process.
13. When people say "transitional forms" they generally mean "a common ancestor for two populations" - and we have tons of those. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html and http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/talk_origins.html
14. Evolution has been observed, countless times, in and out of the laboratory. (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html and http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html)
15. Evolution does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics: to do so, the earth's surface would need to be a closed system, with no energy coming from the sun or the earth's core.
16. Evolution has been proved: it is a "theory" in the same way as the theories of gravity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc. It combines an observable fact (things fall, evolve, etc) with a well-tested explanation about why this happens. There is as much evidence (or more) as for any other of the main theories of science. This differentiates it from a mere hypothesis.
17. Evolution does not claim that phenotypic changes (changes caused by the environment, such as larger size due to better diet, amputations, etc) can be passed from generation to generation.
18. Humans never evolved from chimpanzees or monkeys, but rather that we share a "common ancestor" known as Sahelanthropus tchadensis that existed around seven million years ago.
19. "fish one day decided to come onto land and did so, breathing in their first agonising breath..." is a lovely story, but if breathing was painful in any way, then they simply wouldn't do it. It would be a gradual transition, not a painful "macroevolutionary" leap.
20. There is no commonly held belief in the form of "macroevolution" that causes something like an eye or a leg to form in one step, rather than an number of incremental phases.
21. Humans don't have a special place at the top of the evolutionary tree. We are merely one of many branches.
22. Evolution is not just something that has happened, resulting in the species we see today. It is a basic process of biology and is continuing.

What IS evolution, then?

"any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."

Or, in a way we non-anally-retentive humans might say it:

"a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations."

That is ALL it is.

Say I get a bunch of greenfly, give them plenty of food, and leave them in a tank. Fifty generations pass: will I see evolution? Almost certainly not. Aphids have grown over countless generations, far more than humans, to be pretty well-adapted to their environment.

But what if I made it so that exponentially more food was available to greenfly with longer proboscises? They would be the more likely to survive, grow big and strong, and breed. Over generations, then, you would see a change. Give it long enough and the probosces would be so long that even the shortest in the population would be far bigger than any you saw in the original population.

If you then started giving them all the same amount of food whatever the length? Would the next generation's probosces be short again? Nope, still long, and so would the next generations', and the next, even though it's redundant to grow them so big now. Given enough generations, it might fade back to the old size in the end, because making part of the body bigger has a cost. By showing that it is passed to subsequent generations even when the pressure is gone, we demonstrate that this change is genetic.

You knew that already, I'm sure. So let's go on to the fun stuff.

ID proponents call the above (as CoryT did), "Micro-evolution". They differentiate between this and what they term "Macro-evolution" in that they claim that something significant, or "macro", such as the eye, can't form over time in small microevolutionary steps, so must have been created by God. These features, they claim, are examples of "irreducible Complexity".

But this idea can be shown false if it can be shown that they could have been created such that each step was slightly better than the last, and as feasible as breeding a dog with a longer nose. That is, if you can reduce the irreducible complexity.

You needn't show the exact method used by evolution, since you probably don't have a fossil record of the specific soft-tissue changes. But you do need to show it's feasible, and a good way to do that is to be able to show that all intermediary stages exist in living animals. And that's what has been done for eyes: see the diagram in the post below, hough there are other hypotheses - and since the eye has evolved several times in different ways, it is likely that several could be true. In fact, invertebrates have a better eye than we do: no blind spot because of the non-inverted design.

It has also been done for every other "macroevolutionary" trait raised by ID proponents: beetles with explosive pulse-jet flaming farts, bacterial flagellae, blood clotting, the immune system, etc.

Another bugbear of theists is "speciation". This is where after a time, one group can no longer breed with the other group. This is where some theists draw the line: microevolution, sure, they say: but separate species? Not a chance, for God said "each according to its kind".

I could just say "see the links above, tons of speciation events".

But nah. Speciation is a FUN topic! Because, it's so not such a clear line as the theists think. Wikipedia does do the species problem rather well.

Take two animals: how do you tell if they are a separate species or not? Well, the most common answer is, "can they breed to produce viable offspring?"

1. Can a chihuahua and a St. Bernard? Or a lion and a tiger? Not normally, in nature, but with help, yes. Under this view, they are the same species: "cat", "dog".
2. Can a horse and a donkey? Little bit of a grey area, but not much: the offspring can't breed, so separate species
3. What about the real grey areas? Ring species! Well... they're a single species, unless the intermediaries die off, and then they aren't.

But that's all that evolution needs. Slowly growing away from each other, until the intermediaries die off and you can no longer breed. In some cases it's faster than that: naturally occurring speciation events have been seen in introduced plants in less than a decade, through things like hybridisation. But, if you get a population that's spread over a wide enough area that though adjacent populations can genetically interbreed, the endpoints can't even if you try artificial insemination... then wipe out the middle population with say a tsunami... you have two "kinds".

But you don't need to wipe out the middle population. You can just have two valleys, or two islands, or two niches for food: so long as you have a population that splits in to two places where they're unlikely to come into contact and breed, then the populations will drift apart, and given enough time, split into two species.