His article is interesting and covers a lot of important ground, but it's marred, in my opinion, by misunderstandings of ID in the paragraphs I've excerpted below:
To all of this, the intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer responds by arguing that although he personally believes in biblical revelation, he sees that the case for an Intelligent Designer as an alternative to materialist natural science is best made on purely scientific grounds without any appeal to biblical authority.There are at least two errors in the preceding paragraph. First, Meyer has long been at pains to make clear that the argument for ID is not an argument based on what we don't know but rather is an argument based on what we do know.
He claims that the evidence of science based on our natural observations of the world point to the existence of an Intelligent Designer to explain the appearance of design in the natural world that cannot be explained plausibly by Darwinian evolutionary science.
Meyer’s argument suffers, however, from a fundamental sophistry.
Intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the Intelligent Designer.
To take just one example, what we do know is that blind mechanistic processes do not produce complex specified information such as is found in the molecular machinery and genetic code of living things, but that minds can and frequently do.
Secondly, Meyer, as far as I know, has never said that the inability of evolutionists to demonstrate how living forms arose "proves" that "life must be caused by an Intelligent Designer."
What he and other ID proponents have argued is that the totality of evidence makes ID a more plausible hypothesis than naturalistic evolution. Intelligent agency is, they maintain, the best explanation for the evidence that we see in biology and cosmology.
Arnhart adds this:
This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design are offering no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer miraculously caused these forms of life.This is misleading. ID proponents don't demand that naturalistic theorists explain, for instance, when, where and how abiogenesis occurred. What they do ask for is some plausible explanation of how undirected mindless processes could have accomplished it. That challenge has never really been met.
Meyer insists that the proponents of evolutionary science satisfy standards of proof that he and his fellow proponents of intelligent design cannot satisfy, because his sophistical strategy is to put the highest burden of proof on his opponents, while refusing to accept that burden of proof for himself.
Nor does the inability to explain when, where and how an intelligent agent acted count against a theory that claims that the universe and life are intelligently designed.
As philosopher of science Del Ratszch once wrote, if an exquisitely-shaped titanium obelisk were discovered by the first explorers on Mars none of them would think that because they had no idea who designed it or how, or how it got there, that therefore it wasn't intelligently designed.
The recognition of intelligent agency doesn't require that we know how the agent worked.
I'm frankly surprised that Arnhart raised the objections to ID that he did, given that they've been answered so often by ID proponents in the past.
