Here's the fallacy:

To say "life needs meaning" suggests that "life" operates somehow as speech, indicating meaning outside of itself.

Plato solved the problem by suggesting that worldly things -- and particularly abstract concepts -- were emanation-copies of pure things, perfect and outside of time. Never did figure out how the emanating worked (see the Parmenides).

Christianity followed the model, but called the thing from which the emanation came God. Never did figure out how to reconcile a perfect and unchanging God (Anselm) with the historically active deity of Exodus. Instead, they called the contradiction a mystery, and Jesus was the reconciliation. That doesn't mean anything.

DI works the same way, proposing that because "life" needs meaning outside of itself, it must have meaning outside of it. No word yet on why it needs meaning outside of itself, or how that meaning is supplied.

Occam would suggest that DI is needlessly complex, and so should be dismissed for simpler, wider-ranging, and more internally complex explanations.

There are good Discovery Institute employees. They should be shot last.