Well, the "appearance of design" must necessarily imply an
Apparent Designer, not necessarily an actual one. Hence, while you might possibly argue that something
appears to have been designed, that still does not mean that it was actually designed.
ID is a bit hazy. It was an actual development independent of "creation science", but while it kept itself independent of young-earth-creationism, at the same time it did cozy up to that YEC camp.
I did come across an essay by ID founder Phillip E. Johnson in which he expressed his objection to evolution as being because "evolution leaves God with nothing to do." Well, obviously , Phillip E. Johnson has no clue what he is talking about.
Now, I have seen a number of creationists try to claim that complexity equals "design". They love to point to all kinds of complexity and, with no reason, proclaim that to be proof of design.
Well, by profession I am an engineer. I do know something about how an engineer works and thinks. An engineer works to reduce complexity. Modular design, creating functional modules that you can plug into anywhere, are very popular.
But that is not what we see in real life. When we apply evolutionary methods to engineering designs, we find that the evolutionary designs end up incorporating very complex designs. For example, when evolutionary processes were used to "evolve a design" for a differential amplifier based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) , the resultant "design" was not only very tightly defined, but also had made use of the electrical characteristic of each individual electrical component of that FPGA.
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