“But what exactly is the theory of intelligent design?
......... the theory of intelligent design holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause. The theory does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over time, or even common ancestry, but it does dispute Darwin's idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected.
Either life arose as the result of purely undirected material processes or a guiding intelligence played a role. Design theorists favor the latter option and argue that living organisms look designed because they really were designed.”
But if the rules of a designer produced everything in the world by natural processes then either the processes are directed according to those established rules and hence are not natural and only have the appearance of naturalness or an appeal to a designer is superfluous.
The whole idea behind naturalistic evolution is that none of it gives evidence of a designer and needs none as all results can be explained by natural processes.
” There are very few evolutionists who would argue against that possibility.”
But would they argue for it?
I'm not sure what you're saying in that last part. But when you say "the processes are directed according to those established rules and hence are not natural," would that also apply to the formation of a thunderstorm? Is that not natural because it's "directed" according to the established rules? I've said before, I'm willing to grant that evolution is no more natural and no more unguided than the formation of a storm.
The whole idea behind naturalistic evolution is that none of it gives evidence of a designer and needs none as all results can be explained by natural processes.
Well, none of it gives evidence of a designer any more than all of it gives evidence of a designer. Lowercase intelligent design can credit a designer with setting things up to operate on their own just fine; Intelligent Design demands a designer that fiddles every so often to get the desired result. Intelligent Design is about special cases; intelligent design is about every case.
But would they argue for it?
Some would, and have, right here on FR.
Like Ha Ha, I find this sentence puzzling. It seems like you're saying that if natural processes follow natural law ("establish rules") then, if there is a Creator of the universe, they're not actually natural. So God, although He can do anything, can't create a complex and orderly universe with natural law, but can only "appear" to do so.
If your sentence is serious, rather than confused or incoherent, it sounds quite a bit like the doctrine of occasionalism, which has been almost universally rejected by Christian theologians, but is accepted, and even insisted upon, by many fundamentalist Islamists. (And often taken as one of the reasons Islam has often been inconducive or hostile to science.)
From the wiki entry linked above:
Occasionalism is a philosophical theory about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God Himself. ... The theory states that the illusion of efficient causation between mundane events arises out of God's habitual causing of one event after another. However, there is no necessary connection between the two: it is not that the first event causes God to cause the second event: rather, God first causes one and then causes the other.Islamic theological schools
The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no secondary causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God...