What turned my head around about ID — in a good way — in 1991, well before I met Bill Dembski, was a single paragraph in one of his early papers.
He pointed out that design detection, far from being an esoteric and inscrutable inference, lay in fact at the center of many normal human inquiries and activities, such as:
- intellectual property and copyright law
- criminal detection of all types (e.g., arson investigation)
- insurance investigation
- archaeology and paleoanthropology
- diagnostic logic trees in medicine (e.g., detecting Munchausen syndrome by proxy, where an illness is caused deliberately in a child)
- cryptography and cryptanalysis
And so on. I never thought about design inferences the same way after that, and I gained tremendous confidence in the fundamental rationality of design reasoning.
Biology of course is the hot-button intelligent design inference, but that has nothing to do with the basic logic, and everything to do with the larger implications.