Well, all I can state is my own POV. I am definitely *not* in the young earth camp, that's for sure.
The real problem with Darwinist evolutionary theory (besides the fact that I consider it erroneous) is that it is based on the premise that the earth, indeed the universe, is accidental, and therefore purposeless and soulless. Some people kind of tack on the idea that, well, maybe God used evolution as way to create. But the basic evolutionary premise is without any plan, purpose, or God in control.
And the premise that life is in essence meaningless, purposeless, with no Supreme Godhead, is destroying what makes human civilization human. People who see no eternal future, no eternal justice, only a firefly-like second of eat/sleep/sex and then die, are hopeless people.
You probably know that I am not a doctrinaire kind of person; I respect any religion and any sincere practitioner of any religion that teaches basic moral precepts. But the concept that life has meaning and purpose, that the individual is more than a machine which will drop dead, and that there is a Supreme Being in charge of it all is vital to human existence. And the proponents of evolution deny these truths.
So that's my POV, fwiw.
You make an assumption: that atheism automatically equates to nihilism. I know many atheists, I know no nihilists.
Can you describe a point of view that science could adopt that doesn't assume natural causes for nearly everything?
The word "accidental" has connotations that just don't fit the mission or methodology of science.
Most people who accept science would argue that the fact that Mary dies in a terrorist attack while her co-worker Suzie stays home with a cold to be a stochastic event, not implying some judgement by God. This is not a provable hypothesis, but it does illustrate a philsophical temperament.
In the realm of science there are more sophisticated versions of this. We have all kinds of statistical tests for determining or ruling out correlation. I would think that if ID wanted to have a scientific research program, it would try to demonstrate some correlation between variation and need, some indication that variation anticapates need.
I am troubled by the fact that ID stands in the wings claiming that mainstream science has not explained everything, but hasn't put forward even a proposal for a research program.
moreover, you ignore distinct counterexamples: Bushido, for one.
Very strict moral and ethical code based on the notion that life is fleeting, finite, and all there is.
You are also misstating what the theory of evolution actually says. So many anti-evos focus on the word "Random" in association with evolution that they fail to realize that randomness actually plays little to no role in evolution.
The actual theory of evolution can be summed up in the statement that new species of life can arise as the result of the variation over time of allele frequencies in organism populations, and that this variation over time of allele frequencies in organism populations is the result of mutations that are subject to natural selection. Now, most scientists will tell you that the mutations occur at random, but this isn't really an inherent part of the theory.
For example, if God himself came down and told all of humanity that the scientists had done a good job of figuring out evolution, except that He was the one who directly determined which mutations occurred, what would that do to the validity of the theory of evolution? Answer: absolutely nothing. Evolution doesn't inherently rely on the randomness of the mutations, only that the mutations produce variants of organisms that are not identical with respect to their ability to survive and reproduce.
Note that if God were actually directly manipulating the mutations to produce the creatures He wants, science has nothing and never will have anything to say about it. Such an idea is unfalsifiable, and hence outside the realm of science, which is why such an idea is not part of evolution, which is a SCIENTIFIC theory. Being outside the possible realm of science, such an idea has no ability to impact the validity of ANY scientific theory. (BTW, evolution has precisely NOTHING to say about the universe as a whole. Evolution only applies to those systems which are capable of reproducing imperfectly. Other scientific theories deal with the structure and history of the universe.)