Jon
First, just to clarify that in what I said I wasn’t suggesting that all IDists affirm evolution - I was responding to the idea that assuming evolution, they differentiate what “God” does from what “nature” does. In other words, the idea of design is orthogonal to the idea of interference.
More substantively, I see two related type of arguments at work in ID. Firstly, for someone like Behe, he’s pointing to a process he considers inconsistent with a certain Epicurean account of evolution, ie “purposeless random mutation and natural selection”. So, he claims, that couldn’t in practice produce the flagellum, whose organisation suggests a more teleological process involving intelligent purpose.
Such teleology might well also be at work in the rest of evolution, but since it presents less clearcut signs of design, it’s peripheral to the discussion. Which is as much as to say the designer might well include “random variation and selection” in his game plan, and there’s nothing to be learned from that which fits either explanation.
In other words, Behe’s concentrating on why there is the detail in a painting, rather than on why there is the white space. Nothing in that suggests that the artist and his brush left the white space to chance. So “interference” is not the issue (though in this approach, the word might be used loosely in contrast to the assumed “natural” process being examined, ie Neodarwinian mechanisms).
On the other hand, a probabalist like Dembski looks at the very nature of chance, and concludes that all chance is in reality a probability distribution (though the distribution has not yet been identified in some cases: we know about that of a dice, but not about that of nucleotides in DNA). Further, he concludes that probability distributions themselves are in principle a marker of intelligence (that’s absolutely equivalent to the dictum of the TE population geneticist Dr David Wilcox that “chance is God’s signature”). I’ve examined that in relation to coin-tosses on my blog: the 50:50 probability distribution is entirely the result of the human design of the system.
In Dembski’s case he’s more interesting in comparing probabilities not with a proposed natural process (like “random mutation and natural selection”) but with what would happen in a purely Epicurean, undesigned, universe, where probabilities would follow no measurable distributions and all probabilities are the same. Thus, if one assumes that mutations in, say, pre-biotic RNA, are all equally likely, one can estimate that the probability of forming a self-replicating template is vanishingly low.
On the other hand, if one should discover that in nature, in some way the ntaure of RNA were loaded so that a self-replicating form were more probable, then that probability distribution itself would be a sign of design. More generally, the very existence of order, because it contradicts “Epicurean” expectations and implies some probability distribution, is evidence not that design has been added to nature (interference), but that nature itself is designed.
Note that such a designed nature could involve either or both secondary and primary divine causation, and it would still look like “nature” to us - it just couldn’t look Epicurean.
In that way, when you say “God could create systems which have every appearance of being completely natural” you’re missing the point the best “design” theorists are making (which is, in broad terms, the same point as natural theologians like Aquinas were making). And that is that the true appearance of being “natural”, that is, were there no guiding intelligence, would be chaos - that is, in mathematical terms, a truly random distribution incapable of organisation other than minor local instances of apparent order (such as getting 8 sixes in a row at dice).
I don’t think I’m seriously misrepresenting Dembski in this summary - rather than getting my views from a comedy interview, I did an 8 part review of his “Being as Communion” before it was even published in the USA, and found its ideas deep and intriguing even when I disagreed with them.
I will state that I believe the Bible is God’s revelation to those called to follow Christ.