If the Lord wants the universe to look natural, how as we as men going to discover otherwise? ID is a fool's errand.
That's also a perfectly valid way to look at it. I personally think SETI is a fool's errand for a variety of reasons (including the Fermi Paradox) and don't particularly want public funds spent on it, but I'm not going to have a hissy fit if a teacher mentions SETI or their belief in ET intelligence in class, nor do I think SETI isn't science, even though I think it falls into the same category as ID and doesn't fit the narrow definitions proposed by the ID critics here.
It's theoretically possible God wants the universe to appear natural in general, but left hints that would eventually be discovered by intelligent life. See Contact (the book, not the movie), where they find messages encoded in the decimal expansion of pi. That would be far more convincing than the current state of ID which claims that if we don't know the exact process by which something evolved, then God did it.