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Here's a not overly un-representative sampling from this tome:

Two main such constraints have historically been used to keep design outside the natural sciences: methodological naturalism and dysteleology. According to methodological naturalism, in explaining any natural phenomenon the natural sciences are properly permitted to invoke only natural causes to the exclusion of intelligent causes.

I am sorry, I really tried, but this stuff is just too etherial for me. What I was really looking for was something like "kilroy was here" scribbled out on some junk DNA. What you might, in less high-falutin' circles, call "evidence".

Dembski & Behe & such folk have a basic point which could be correct--probably is correct about a couple of things. However, that butters way fewer parsnips than one might have hoped. It is without question the case that we are quite puzzled by many of the steps in the putative story of Life. it is without question that outside interference is a perfectly possible explanation. However, I am still left wondering how the interferee evolved, and I appear to have only put off my questions to a higher arena: the universe as a stage for life, rather than the earth as a stage for life. How does this help scratch my curiosity bump?

Secondly, to give up on natural explanations, I need some indication that the alternative I'm being offered is somehow a more insightful, or more useful explanation of things. That is why, for example, we gave up on Ptolomaic astronomy in favor of copernican astronomy, even though both are clearly "right". And I have looked in vain for the utility of non-natural explanations. In other words--fat lot of good it does me to know beings from a superior culture or superior plane of existence shaped the past. I can find oil by tracing the history of Permian beaches through their fossil strata. I can't find oil by assuming God whupped it all up from scratch, so shut up and stop digging up fossils and putting them in order--dern kids!

The assumptions we make right now have value in our current paradigm, so we are going to go on using them. When Behe and/or Dembski provides us with an explanatory framework we can do something with that seems equally valuable, we'll consider making a change. Truth, with a capital T, is not the business of science. Coming up with a good story that has utility and predictive power right now, but will with virtual certainty be replaced by a better story in the future is the business of science. Behe and Dembski get their traction from this very fallible and tentative nature of all sciences, not just evolutionary theory.

Irreducible complexity means exactly what I originally suggested: that because you can't think of a natural explanation for flagella, for example, therefore the best science is to assume that it doesn't have natural causes. This is just wrong, no matter how many fancy words you wrap it in. Natural explanations have turned out to be the hands-down best bet so far, and we need a smoking gun, like the pythagorean theorem etched in the flagella's RNA, to suggest it is worthwhile to abandon the search for natural explanations.

Let me start by clearing up the term "dysteleology," since you've placed it in bold. It simply points to the belief that God couldn't have done it, because by somebody's standards, it's "imperfect" (and God would only create after first consulting our standards of "perfection", right?) This sort of objection to ID is still sometimes raised by some of its critics, and it is naive in its supposition that we are competent judges not only of such a designer's intentions, but of how that designer would or should make those intentions manifest. The arrogance of this view is too obvious to dwell on.

Secondly, I want to congratulate you on your scientific open-mindedness. I rarely see that around here. You at least allow that a supranatural intelligent designer is in the realm of scientific possibility.

Concerning your evident belief that ID requires us to deny practical scientific information, nothing in ID suggests this. As I've stated before, much of what has come to light through the efforts of evolutionists is of great value. Dembski freely acknowledges this and is thankful for it. But when evolutionists, for instance, propose Darwinian algorithms to explain things like natural selection, and then sulk because those algorithms are shown mathematically to lack anthing near the informational, and therefore explanatory power, that's been claimed for them, I have to wonder what they're defending -- because it's certainly not science. Dembski has no problem at all accepting that the Earth is almost certainly 4-5 billion years old and that the physical universe is equally likely to be on the order of 14-16 billion years old. The evidence is just too compelling to take issue with this. Likewise, he would not dispute for one moment, the efficacy of the geologic techniques of oil exploration (supra) and their underlying scientific rationale. ID does not seek to limit the explanatory power of science. On the contrary, it seeks to expand that power by freeing it from an unnecessarily limiting paradigm, one that excludes the stronger theory in favor of the weaker, simply to perpetuate itself.