The Design Revolution by William Dembski

I especially take exception to: I don't see this anywhere. It might have changed the creationist political movement, but I can't see anywhere in the scientific literature or in scientific methodologies that ID has had an effect. Does the author support his claim with anything? At most, it has created it's own section of discourse among creationists and evolutionists, both through online debates and the popular press, but I don't see how the practice of science has changed one bit.

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Archeologists are not seeking signs of intelligent design, but signs of being man-made or of human origin.

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And they also forget that geolgists look for patterns when searching for fossils, but they aren't looking for something intelligently designed. Instead, they look for something that is evolving. When they find a fossil, they don't scream out "an intelligence must have made this!"Secondly, we also look for patterns when looking at something that is derived from organisms (be it a termite mound or a burrow) by asking the question "can this be caused by non-organismal mechanisms." When looking at arrowheads, they ask "could this be caused by non-organismal mechanisms." The answer to both is no. When looking at biological organisms, scientists ask "could this be caused by something in nature," and the answer is yes: evolution. IDists throw out the one question that archaeologists and geologists ask first, is there something in nature, other than the cause in question, that could have caused this. Instead, they claim it is impossible, and leave it there.

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To deny that nature is stochastic is to ignore voluminous evidence. But stochastic does not imply purposeless. That's a metaphysical assumption.
  —paisano

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Absolutely correct, and if I may add to your ideas . . .Even in the absence of religion or appeal to a "higher order", humans are able to find purpose in life. If Dembski is correct, then merely denying the existence of the supernatural designer would render our lives meaningless and without purpose. What we find is that athiests do find purpose in life, and find very deep meaning. Somehow, the reality of our intelligence HAS to have a purpose, but Dembski never says why, or even how the process that resulted in our intelligence in any way has bearing on how we should use it. The properties of a waterdrop are no different than if they came from a cloud or a garden hose; a blade of grass is no different than if it was purposefully planted in a pasture or randomly seeded in the wild. The problem I see is that Dembski, himself, needs the existence of the supernatural for his life to have meaning and so he mistakenly projects this need onto all of mankind. You could as easily argue that man's intelligence needs to have stochastic or natural origins so that man may create his own future and use his intelligence as he sees fit. Instead of purposeless, perhaps we are unconstrained from a predefined destiny.

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And we can fully expect that because DNA is ordered into nucleotide sequences that Dembski will say it is contingent and specified, and that because it is long it is complex. Voil! Intelligent design!

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This really is the problem, finding specificity in DNA. By analogy, we could claim that water is intelligently designed to fit the bottom of a lake. The shape of the lake is both specific and complex and water perfectly matches it. Of course, water has no choice but to fit the shape of the lake. In the same manner, DNA has no choice but to conform to the forces of natural selection. Dembski also runs into problems by comparing length with complexity since there are single celled organisms that have 10 times the amount of DNA than a human being. If length does not result in multicellular complexity, then length is not a good measure of complexity.