Remember that I concede in the article that "the aesthetic discourse would have to change because intelligently designed products are intended whereas nature’s mindless ones aren’t, at least not according to objective philosophical and scientific explanations. Still, the essential value dichotomy would remain between beauty and monstrous ugliness."

So I don't think it's an equivocation. My point is that some stripped-down aesthetic assessments should piggyback on scientific explanations because natural causality amounts to immense creativity. Just think of cosmology: from the simpler states to the more atomically complicated, from darkness and gas to stars and solid planets and galaxies, and so on. It's the natural self-creation (or development) of order at every level of analysis.