The normal definition of idolatry is the worship of something less than God as divine. That would include the worship of statues, other human artifacts, animals, plants, mountains, streams, stars, and so on.
I’m trying to figure out how either ID or YEC (Poor OEC! It must feel sad, always being left out of these sweeping generalizations!) might be guilty of “idolatry.”
I have heard Biblical literalists, including YECs, being accused of “bibliolatry” – worshiping the Bible as if it were God. There is some justification for that charge, in some cases. I’ve made it myself, of some literalists. But as ID theory isn’t based on the Bible at all, and doesn’t invoke a literal reading of Genesis to establish anything, “idolatry” in that sense doesn’t apply to ID.
So what might be “idolatrous” about ID? Worshiping nature as if it were God? No, ID folks, at least Christian ID folks, can’t be charged with that one, either. They all very clearly distinguish between creation and Creator, often using metaphors like clock and clockmaker to stress the difference. They would be horrified at the thought of worshiping the sun, the moon, or even beautiful structures like the camera eye or the flagellum, or even the pervasive fine-tuning of nature. They would say we should admire those contrivances, but not worship them; they would say that worship is owed only to the author of those contrivances. And of course, this was exactly the position of the inspirers and founders of modern science such as Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. So if ID is guilty of idolatry for admiring the contrivances in nature, then I guess all those guys were idolaters – but that is not the general consensus of historians.
So I’m left scratching my head. It seems to me that if anything might border on idolatry, it would be the view of TEs like Van Till, with their conception of a “fully gifted” nature, which, once created at the beginning of time, has the ability to itself create galaxies, stars, planets, atmospheres, oceans, life, multicelled life, vertebrates, mammals, primates, hominids, and man, all by virtue of its own self-possessed powers. Nature in such a view become a Demiurge, a sort of stand-in for God. It would only take the smallest intellectual nudge to kick the original Creator out of the picture (after all, Hawking etc. tell us we can have new universes for free, without a Creator), and go with a wholly self-existent Nature. The Van Till view is thus virtually idolatry in the making. And this brings us back to the title of the discussion, why ID criticizes TE. 
