Well in spite of the fact many Christians have jumped on the band wagon of
ID it doesn't necessarily support the Biblical creation story in a literal
sense and in any case is open to interpretation. In fact you can accommodate
aspects of evolution within ID and things such as Panspermia and the Ancient
Astronaut theory and even argue that intelligence and evolution are two
sides of the same coin.

This is perfectly true. However most Evangelicals who support ID would
tend to believe in the LITERAL truth of Genesis. The problem with
panspermetia or God beiing an asronaut is that the Universe has been in
existence for a finite time (13.7 billion years). Anything which
evolved before us would have had this problem. In fact it is quite
possible that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we ARE the most
advanced in this neck of the woods and that OUR VN probes will make it
to other stars. Nobody else's have yet.

But anything that self replicates would have to be able to adapt and evolve
by a process of trail and error and natural selection and learn by these
adaptations, if evolution is correct it would eventually become more and
more complex until it became sentient, if it didn't already have a kind of
non individualistic sentience in a "We are the Borg" kind of way :)

A VN machine would have the evolutionary potential which its creator
decided to build into it. No more - No less. In fact its potential to
evolve will have to be limited for our own safety. It is not true that
sentient beings are the inevitable result of evolution. They may
result, they don't have to. Evolution is survival of the fittest. The
fittest may be the most intelligent, but they don't have to be.

We would design a self replicator, and the design is in fact not that
compilcated. If a robot can assemble a flatpack it can do the general
mecanical task.

A machine, or process, has a set of inputs and outputs. A tool is of
course an input which is not consumed, or rather is consumed slowly as
it wears out. If every part, assembly, sub assembly or material is
either an output from a process or is naturally occuring we have a
replicator that will replicate itself in the presence of the resources.
Resources are defined as being inputs which are not manufactured.

As I have said, this is not necessarily complicated. In fact a vast
range of processes (all CAD/CAM processes) are open to us on assembly
of a flatpack. Thus a VN machine is present (potentially) when we have
a robot that does really useful tasks.