It’s curious that one person argues that my random hitting of keys is information but isn’t really random and another argues that it is random but isn’t really information. Although it is true that I had a purpose behind the action, the exact outcome was not predetermined by me. If you want a less ambiguous lack of purpose form the immediate agent, a rainstorm creates lots of information: “a raindrop hit right there at this particular instant.” That, like random typing, is a piece of information. Although information about one raindrop is generally not that important, the cumulative information “this place gets a lot of raindrops” is extremely important for both human and non-human life and also has significant effect on the landscape.
My research includes both paleontological work on fossils and analyses of DNA sequences, so I have a fair level of acquaintance with the topics invoked by ID. Note, however, that ID as a self-identified “big tent” includes a wide range of positions. Being able to get along across a range of views is a good thing, but often ID is marketed as agreeing on the particular view held by the target audience rather than including an assortment of disparate positions.
ID tends to invoke two different general claims. One is the anthropic principle - the claim that having natural laws just right for intelligent biological life to exist is highly unlikely, pointing to a designer behind the laws that exist for our universe. The other is the claim to scientifically detect evidence of gaps in the natural order that cannot be bridged by natural laws. These two are somewhat in conflict with each other - to what extent does having a gap not bridged by natural law imply a failure of design in those laws? It would be better to design a computer program to have flexibility and to work well to begin with than to be constantly putting out updates, for example.
The claim that both of these are scientific is also problematic. We don’t understand what happens as you get extremely close to the singularity of the Big Bang. As far as I can tell, scientific ideas of what might lead to the Big Bang are entirely speculative, beyond the possibility of any direct tests. We can only study the universe that we are in and can’t compare it to known designed or undesigned universes to see if it matches one or the other. Although one can reasonably say “It looks pretty unlikely to me that all the laws would just happen to work out” (and multiverse arguments are not a very satisfying counter), science can’t help there… If we know something about the designer and the reasons for designing something, then we can see if a proposed designed object fits the purpose. For example, one early reason to be skeptical of the Piltdown finds was that one object was a mammoth bone carved into what looked like a cricket bat. That seemed unlikely to actually be something that a prehistoric human would take the time to do. But that requires knowing something about the designer; it does not fit with the ID movement’s claims to find evidence of some designer without further specification. Although the ID movement also markets itself as Christian apologetics, in fact the movement includes an assortment of atheistic, deistic, and theistic positions that are generally not well thought through for theological implications. ID often claims to just be science detecting some designer, the task of filling up the blanks they’d rather leave to you.
The approach of ID seems to be “Oooh, complex molecular systems are amazing! Let’s look for ways that they resemble human-designed systems.” In reality, randomness is the most complex possibility. Next time you’re filling out tax forms, consider whether complexity or simplicity is a better mark of intelligence. Biological systems are often complex, but the complexity tends to be more along the lines of Rube Goldberg’s designs rather than what we should expect for engineering-style design. In reality, biological molecules have functions. The basic premise of irreducible complexity that the intermediates aren’t functional can’t be proved for any biochemical system.
Note that both proving and disproving intervention-style design is quite difficult. Although I don’t see any reason either theologically or scientifically to expect to find any gaps in evolution as a good description of the natural patterns used by God to create new kinds of organisms. it’s not impossible that God might have used a more miraculous approach at some point.
Again, the creation accounts in Genesis are perfectly reasonable as theological narrative in an ancient Near Eastern context; it is the modernistic misinterpretation of the accounts as using a modern historico-scientific style that is flawed.