At the college level, the breadth of course offerings allows for much more freedom to explore the topic. Richard Miller, IU religious studies professor and director of The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions, said Poynter has served as a hub for disseminating information about the debate for various members of the IU faculty.

Poynter is working to compile resources that could help science teachers at the college and high school levels in addressing the debate, he said.

But Miller said his key concern is that “non-scientific ideas are finding a voice from political and cultural leaders who are unable to support them on scientific terms.”

The problem goes beyond the evolution versus intelligent design debate, he said.

“Many public policy decisions rely on sound science. The more we allow pseudo-scientific ideas a hearing, the more we place ourselves in peril when it comes to decisions about global warming and a host of other environmental and biomedical matters,” Miller said. “There is the increasing danger of ‘faith-based politics’ that fails to heed scientific evidence in the public square.”

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: Is there room for both? IDSNEWS.com, September 27, 2005

Corresponding to these features of science and scientific practices is a set of intellectual virtues and duties that are inherent in the structure of scientific inquiry: a duty to expand its explanatory armamentaria; a duty to gather evidence; a willingness to fairly assess and be responsive to evidence; a willingness to have one’s results rigorously tested
by one’s peers; and a refusal borne by humility to assert anything more than what the evidence warrants and to be open to alternative explanations of phenomena. We find these virtues at risk, and these duties shirked, in the recent debates about evolution, intelligent design and scientific education, about which we will say more below.

Good examples include the claims about the Cambrian explosion, the information content of DNA, irreducible complexity.

Intelligent design advocates cast themselves as scientists who are pursuing an empirically-based research program that seeks to explain biological origins, development
and diversity.

Intelligent Design, Science Education, and Public Reason by Robert A. Crouch, Richard B. Miller,
Lisa H. Sideris, The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions Indiana University

But are IDers pursuing such a program? How does ID explain designed systems? When asked, Dembski responded that such requirements were pathetic…

ID has taken various positions over time, such as the claim that ID explains better certain aspects of life and yet no explanations are ever provided beyond the meaningless label of ‘designed’. Design merely points to the inability of science to yet explain a particular feature.

I would like to offer a definition of randomness which may help alleviate the concerns some may have about this concept when it comes to evolutionary sciences, arguing that randomness is essentially at odds with a ‘designer’…

For our purposes, an informal definition of randomness as “what happens in a situation where we cannot predict the outcome with certainty” is sufficient. In many cases, this might simply mean lack of information.
For example, if we flip a coin, we might think of the outcome as random. It will be either heads or tails, but we cannot say which, and if the coin is fair, we believe that both outcomes are equally likely. However, if we knew the force from the fingers at the flip, weight and shape of the coin, material and shape of the table surface, and several other parameters, we would be able to predict the outcome with certainty, according to the laws of physics. In this case we use randomness as a way to describe uncertainty due to lack of information.

Probability, Statistics, and Stochastic Processes by Peter Olofsson