So your an Athiest

[AAA]

This will be my last response on this page, because I'm sick of us arguing in circles and not getting anywhere. I don't know that we were produced by an intelligence, but I think that it is a better explanation for the design (which all cases of design where we know the origin proceeds from intelligence) that we see. 

So, I've only just gotten to this thread, but how exactly did you determine that you see design within biological life? Because when I look at life, with all its redundancies, downright flaws, and issues with obvious resolutions, I don't see design. I see exactly what we would expect if life evolved due to processes that had no concept of the comfort and functionality of the organisms that result, only that they survive.

And frankly, that is a better explanation than intelligence anyway, since it's not only readily demonstrable, it also requires less unjustified assumptions. Why make the additional step of assuming intelligence without positive evidence for one, just because you have things that one might intuitively suspect leads to design?

Until better evidence can reasonably explain a bottom up process that leads to information and increasing complexity, my default position is that the intelligent information had an intelligent designer.

That's called "evolution," it has over a century of peer reviewed scientific consensus and evidence that has only ever confirmed or strengthened it, and explains all those things. Incidentally, how are you defining information?

And you are aware that "until someone provides a better answer I'm going with this one," is an argument from ignorance, yes?

You say that life forms show absolutely no evidence of top-down design. That is just a misinformed assertion with no basis in the facts. It shows plenty of evidence of design with complex interplay, and you really have to stretch the theory of evolution to account for their interactivity.

Not only is complexity not an indicator of design- intelligent designers strive for simplicity, not a whole bunch of moving parts- but complex interplay is easily encompassed within evolutionary theory: the things that each organism interacts with exist within their environment, they were always a part of the natural selection pressures involved in the evolution of that organism. They interact because they evolved around each other.

Our genome seems to be decreasing in function as time goes on which is more consistent with a top-down design than a bottom up design.

What makes you say that? No, seriously, you've given no reason at all why you think that.

Uhhg, I really wanted to end the discussion. Virtually everything in your post has already come up, and I have already answered them. (apparently not well, because the same issues keep recirculating). The reason there seem to be a lot of assertions in my last post were because it was meant to be a summary of many of the other posts I have given, which I believe do use evidence to back them.

You say that life doesn't reflect intelligent design. Flaws in what way? You say you think life reflects what you would expect to see if the only thing being acted upon was the organisms ability to survive, yet life has many features that go beyond the basics of survival and reproduction.  Life has tremendous complexity and amazing specifically functioning systems in the cell: the communication via signal transduction pathways, genes regulating other genes (try to explain that one with evolution), and molecular machines that are necessary but not sufficient for life. Evolution explains the addition of new genetic information poorly. Point mutations are so infrequent that to expect them to compile themselves in the necessary order to form a new gene without at any point crippling the organism's ability to survive is unrealistic. Other forms of mutation such as recombination events are still not adding new information, they are just rearranging and modifying pre-existing information. Gene duplication events do produce additional bases, but again the duplicated protein has to change slowly across generations to develop a new function without crippling the organism. And until it got a new function, it would be under no selective pressure to keep it functional. I do not think that randomly altering information is a process capable of improving the information content of that system. I hear (I know this isn't credible info since I haven't personally done it) that genetic algorithms used to test the models do not support its viability unless you make some of the variables unrealistic. Evolution is not readily demonstrable, and to say that it is so is spreading ignorance. Sure changes occur, but point me to one increase in complexity. I think the genome is decreasing in functionality because virtually all diseases are the result of mutations arising in protein coding sequences of the genome resulting in a defective genome. Diseases are increasing in the population (partially due to poor lifestyle, but also due to defective alleles becoming more common). 

I'll attempt to define biological information: Irregular sequential organization of monomers, that have no chemical preference for their order, that exist in a way that allows them to accomplish a complex set of goals.