Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Asmodee]

Not really. We have a feature in something that humans did not make. We humans have produced this feature repeatedly with the input of intelligence. No other cause has stood up to scrutiny, which leaves intelligence as the only known cause for the feature. It also isn't that they MUST be the product of design. That was never part of the argument. We may find a better explanation tomorrow.

Really. And that's before even getting into the 'other things' being living organisms.

That the 'other cause' (evolution by heritable variation and natural selection) hasn't stood up to scrutiny is false given any reasonable assessment of scrutiny, given 150 years of people trying to prove it wrong and that there's a Nobel waiting for anyone who can find a better explanation that's going unclaimed. Intelligent Design on the other hand has fallen apart at every point where proponents have claimed 'irreducible complexity'. I'll give them this: they proposed a testable hypothesis. Too bad for them that the hypothesis fails every time it's tested. And at this point, any 'better explanation' that may turn up tomorrow will have to explain all the evidence that led us to conclude that natural selection acting on heritable variation is the explanation.

I just noticed this.  It really bugs the hell out of me when people use the "Sherlock Holmes" the answer.  You know the quote.  "If you eliminate the impossible whatever is left, however improbable, must be the answer."  I fucking hate that quote because morons everywhere think it's so fucking wise.  Most of them don't even know it's a line from a novel set in a fictional universe.  They just believe, ESPECIALLY creationists, that if you can just eliminate every notion you don't like they "win by default" because after they've rejected everything else theirs is the only answer left.  Reality just doesn't fucking work like that.  You can't find out "what is" by finding out "what is not".  That would be like saying that Mr. X MUST have been the murderer because I don't accept your explanation that Mr. Y did it.  There's no evidence to prove Mr. X did it, but I don't like him and since I've eliminated every other suspect you presented, Mr. X is your man.  But no, I didn't bother to eliminate any of the other 7 billion people on the planet as suspects, just the one you put forth.  It irritates me to no end that people are too fucking stupid to see just how fucking stupid that is.

Then there's also the elephant in the room with that statement, intelligence is not a "known" cause for natural structures, it's a "believed" cause.  No natural structure has ever been proved to have been "designed" by anything.  In fact, the ONLY designer we are absolutely certain of is humans (unless you count things like beaver dams as being "designed" rather than simple products of instinct, but that's another conversation).  By definition something which is designed "by humans" is not and cannot also be "a natural structure".  Something cannot be both "natural" and "designed by humans".  So, humans being the only designers we are absolutely, unquestionably certain about, the terms "designed" and "naturally occurring" are mutually exclusive terms.  So the comparison between the naturally occurring and things designed specifically be humans to prove the naturally occurring structures are designed by "not humans" is really quite ludicrous because you are comparing two mutually exclusive things.