Moot:
I appreciate your willingness to research ID further. I believe a sincere effort and an open mind will lead you to reconsider absolute statements such as “ID is a fraud.” I suspect the person who explained ID to you was uninformed regarding ID, and was likely just repeating someone else’s strawman version of ID. As for what questions ID seeks to answer, they are the same questions mainstream evolutionary theory seeks to answer. It can and does make testable predictions. More than that, ID is a paradigm through which scientific research can be carried out. Indeed, the idea that the universe and everything in it were designed was a guiding principle of science from its beginning (an idea promoted by the Catholic Church and its off-shoots, and kept alive through the dark ages by it). It was this paradigm that led early thinkers to assume that nature would be law-driven, and that it could thus be described mathematically. It was an underlying belief of most of the great historical figures of science, both before Darwin and even after him.
We use design detection methods in many fields of science today (forensics, archeology, cryptography). ID simply seeks to apply those same techniques to biology and cosmology. After ruling out chance and necessity, intelligent causation is a logical alternative to consider. It does not stop science any more than knowing that a piece of unfamiliar technology is designed would stop a person from attempting to understand how it works or how it was designed. Neither is it necessary to know who the designer is in order to arrive at a design inference. It seems to me that ruling out a possible explanation a priori is dogmatic, and certainly more damaging to science.
As for the “bad-design equals no design” argument, this is a logical fallacy. It presumes to know the original design specifications (we certainly don’t), assumes the nature of the designer (that he/she/it was infallible) and assumes that the design is unchanged since the prototype. You see, ID does not claim that evolution (change over time) does not occur, only that it has limits to what it can do. It is generally characterized by a loss of information (degeneration), and rarely if ever results in significant improvements. The bad-design argument ignores the distinction between “perfect design” and “optimum design.” As any engineer will tell you (and I are one), every system is a collection of compromises that, if done well leads to an optimum design. If you could change the environment it will operate in (alter the laws of nature, for instance) or perhaps isolate it from affects of interconnected systems, you could possibly arrive at a “perfect” design, but that is rarely practical.
