I don’t think that Venter is suggesting intelligent design. He’s claiming, as a result of his research, that it’s not effective to assume simple explanations for genomics and especially for cellular biology.

Every technological improvement in the methods of research has revealed more complexity in organisms and so it behooves us to suspend dogmatic approaches to the genome. That’s the subject of the book discussed in the article.

Craig Venter is very controversial and his statements are provocative. I’m not qualified to critique the science in this field. But I’d recommend you to take a look at the work his team is doing with synthetic chromosomes and engineered cells.