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I suggest that serious scientists distance themselves from all the people (such as those named above) who are promoted by web sites like infidels.org, AmericanHumanist.org.

If this was to happen, then a lot of the controversy would go away. I do not believe that serious ID theorists have a problem with those evolutionists who do not insist that evolution is a completely random process. This is a metaphysical assumption every bit as much as the assumption of a designer. Personally, I have no problem with such assumptions, although I do consider the assumption of a designer to be more rational. Science as we know it started with the assumption that the universe is orderly and its laws could be discovered by human reason. That is a metaphysical assumption. The word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, from scient-, sciens having knowledge, from present participle of scire to know. It had broader connotations than the narrow one we give it today. I tend to be a partial to the classical approach and have no problem with using metaphysical assumptions as the basis for scientific inquiry. (As long as dogmatism does not cause one to force the evidence to fit the assumption)