Maybe my naivete is extreme, but it seems to me that science would have nothing to research if there was no reason in creation. Isn't that what scientists DO... try to find out how things work? If they kept discovering chaos, they would stop.
Sure, scientists look for patterns and principles that describe the underlying order in what may look superficially like chaos. And many people (the famous Deist from whom I took my screen name, for example) have regarded the existence of such order generally as evidence of a "cosmic architect" or "designer."
But that's not what the ID folks argue. They claim to be able to tell apart two different kinds of order: one that can be explained in terms of the operation of natural law, and one that can't. It's only the latter that they attribute to the operation of intelligence.
As a matter of science, their "argument" founders on the fact that they haven't got any reliable way to tell the two apart or any real program for investigating the matter scientifically.
"They claim to be able to tell apart two different kinds of order: one that can be explained in terms of the operation of natural law, and one that can't. "
How do they explain "natural law" in the first place? Where do they say it comes from?