Hmmm. I didn’t realize that this was such a hot issue for you. I never really knew what Alex Williams was referring to until I started reading Werner Gitt’s “In the Beginning was Information.” His thesis does not exclude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information. Rather, it merely stipulates that Shannon’s theory occupies the lowest level of information, namely statistics (as opposed to the highest level, meaning).
The theory is mathematics, plain and simple. Meaning of the message has no bearing on the communication of it. That is where the Shannon theory ends.
Meaning in the biological message goes to complex systems theory, another subject altogether bringing in issues such self-organizing complexity, cellular automata, algorithmic complexity, Kolmogorov complexity, etc. Ditto for autonomy and semiosis.
The Shannon theory is a powerful argument in the intelligent design debate - indeed, in many theological and philosophical debates as well.
If the correspondent ignores it, minimizes it or mixes other issues into it, he is hurting his own argument.
Because the mathematical theory is universal as it is, it is portable between many disciplines. It is well established.
It is like a Caterpillar in these debates, why would anyone want to use it like a little red wagon?
But Shannon theory is not about information per se (in the sense of an intelligible message), merely about how it is conveyed. As such, it conveys both low-level and high-level information. It is perfectly indifferent to the content of the message. IOW, it is indifferent to questions of meaning altogether. That's for the receiver to figure out, once successful communication has occurred.