‘So why should we be surprised that Thomas Nagel, notorious for his subjectivism in the philosophy of mind, has come out in favor of creationism?’

You give no argument from this claim, which is false, in fact.  Nagel is an atheist who rejects creationism. says so explicitly in his article and also signals it at the end of his brief synopsis of the Meyer book, which certainly seems worth reading. One does not come out in favor of a position in which one explicitly disbelieves. 'I do not regard divine intervention as a possibility, even though I have no other candidates' (202).

The blog to which you link says that Nagel is no longer reputable, that Nagel has made a fool of himself. And this is only the latest embarrassment. In addition, the article from Philosophy and Public Affairs is comically bad. The blog continues with the manifest falsehood that the article is almost entirely footnote  free, and adds that its publication is a symptom of the corruption of the journal editorial staff and that the article could never have been published in a reputable scholarly journal. As the article is first rate, in fact, this is just slander.

This is the ‘fog of ad hominems’ I had in mind. The strategy, not yours but the blogs, is to trash anyone who suggests intelligent design literature is worth reading and considering on its merits. Including people who disbelieve it, like Nagel. Such people are beyond the pale, and we should be beyond the pale ourselves if we read and considered this stuff. In short, there is something they don’t want us to read and the hope is that by bashing Nagel, they can discourage us from reading it. Best not to fall for this sort of thing. A traditional role of philosophy has been to defend unpopular views against bad arguments. I applaud Nagel’s courage and intelligence. He is quite straightforward as to where he stands personally, by the way. He is skeptical that the neo-Darwinain account is sufficient to explain the whole story of life on this planet, but he rejects any supernatural intervention. He suggests that there may be an alternative
naturalistic account.

As to the article to which you kindly provided the link, I think it’s superb but I disagree with it in a particular place. Nagel in effect identifies Intelligent Design with creationism. I think the relation between the two views is more complex. Intelligent design is the view that something purposive or teleological was at work, either in the evolutionary process or in the creation of life itself. The claim is that the sort of naturalistic account Darwinian theory offers doesn’t plausibly account for the emergence of life and its evolution. Now the ID theorists, chiefly professional biologists, mathematicians, and philosophers, maintain that ID, if it’s true, supports creationism. And indeed, as Christians, they are creationists. But they also point out that the intelligent design may have flowed from some source other than God. In the books and articles I have read by these people, the work is highly intelligent, scientifically informed, apparently sincere, and alive to criticisms. And I’ve talked to some of them personally. So I think they mean it. In short, if aliens show up one day and explain how they created life on earth and guided its evolution, it would prove intelligent design but disprove creationism. Therefore Intelligent Design isn’t creationism and it’s possible for atheists to consistently embrace Intelligent Design.

On the subject, I sent this letter to the New York Review of Books, which didn’t publish it.

    ‘Richard Lewontin (20 Oct 2005, 'The Wars Over Evolution', NYRB) characterizes Intelligent Design as the claim that 'an objective examination of the facts of life make it clear that organisms are too complex to have arisen by a process of the accumulation of naturally selected chance mutations and so must have been purposely created by an unspecified intelligent designer.' (p. 52)  He notes that God, the Bible and religion are unmentioned.  Nonetheless Lewontin dismisses ID as a 'transparent subterfuge.'  He argues:

    The problem is that if the living world is too complex to have arisen without an intelligent designer, then where did the intelligent designer come from? After all, she must have been as complex as the things she designed. If not, then we have evolution! Otherwise we must postulate an intelligent designer who designed the intelligent designer who..., back to the original one who must have been around forever. And who might that be? (p. 52)

    This objection is weak. Why must a designer be as complex as what she designs?  Human intelligence is stacked on top of an astonishingly complex biological system, but what actually realizes our intelligence may be much less complex. (For instance, some psychologists  maintain the work is done by a connectionist system, which could be realized in principle by sets of ping pong balls; others say the mind is software that could be run in principle on a 'computer' made of rolls of toilet paper and rubber bands.) As nature may be able to realize intelligence in multiple ways and in various stuff, we can't  preclude the possibility that the universe contains non-biological physical systems more intelligent than humans but simpler than biological life-forms.    

    Lewontin seems to think that a physical thing's designing a more complex physical thing conflicts with ID: this would be 'evolution'!  But evolution ( that is, increasing complexity) by design is consistent with ID. If we one day designed organisms more complex than ourselves, this wouldn't refute ID. Nothing in it precludes a designer's being simpler physically than what she designs.

    How might such systems arise? Supposing that natural selection and intelligent design are the two most plausible contenders to explain the complexity of life-forms on Earth, it hardly follows that they exhaust the options for intelligent physical systems in the entire universe. As we don't know what these systems would even be made of (they might be star clusters, for all we know), we can barely speculate about natural processes that might produce them. Intelligence might arise as an artifact of the organizational complexity of a non-living thing.  The designers might even evolve by a process like natural selection, but operating over a  far longer time than the span available here and producing markedly simpler systems. That we lack an account of how smart things very different from us can arise naturally is no reason to conclude it couldn't happen.     

    ID is most plausible when it's construed as a 'local' thesis about how animals like us arose here on Earth. As such, it is entitled to be agnostic about how the designers were made. ID entails a supernatural designer only if we take it as a grand metaphysical claim, e.g. 'Intelligence  can arise only by design.' So construing ID, despite its advocates' protests, already casts it as a subterfuge--what Lewontin's argument was supposed to show. There's no substitute for taking a theory at its best.’