Is atheism a scientific perspective?

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1. If you are pointing and laughing, then you must not realize how impressive the organisms are on the molecular and cellular level. You don't care about the fact that most of your genes can be transcribed forward and backwards to produce different products. You don't care that your RNA can be differentially spliced or edited to produce functional variation. You don't care that your cells can release compounds in vesicles that can travel throughout the body to communicate with other cells. You don't care that you have a blood brain barrier to protect your most valuable organ from environmental stressors. You don't care about the intricate signal transduction pathways that allow you to respond to exquisitely precise stimuli. You don't care that your phenotype is flexible based on changes in transcription. You don't care that your billions of neurons have traveled so specific targets during their development all based largely on calcium concentration and the post synaptic membrane protein composition. You don't care that fruits and vegetables contain antioxidants to limit DNA damage, chelators to prevent metal toxicity, hormone like molecules to enhance cellular function, and common sugars and nutrients to provide energy. None of this matters to you. All you care about is that your esophagus is near your trachea.

And the deep reverance and awe that you feel (and justifiably so) for these beautifully intricate and complex workings of microbiology have lead you to:  "I simply can't imagine or understand how these things could have come about without an intelligent agent - therefore, design."

You can stamp your feet about it all you want, but it's still an argument from personal incredulity; totally lacking in any positive evidence for an actual design, or your assumed designer/s.

No, it's not that "I can't imagine or understand how they couldn't come about without an intelligent agent", it is that NOBODY who has ever lived (despite a thorough search) can even imagine a reasonable scenario to describe their origin other than intelligence. Therefore design is a reasonable conclusion. It is not lacking positive evidence, these things are continuously associated with intelligence.

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1. If you are pointing and laughing, then you must not realize how impressive the organisms are on the molecular and cellular level. You don't care about the fact that most of your genes can be transcribed forward and backwards to produce different products. You don't care that your RNA can be differentially spliced or edited to produce functional variation. You don't care that your cells can release compounds in vesicles that can travel throughout the body to communicate with other cells. You don't care that you have a blood brain barrier to protect your most valuable organ from environmental stressors. You don't care about the intricate signal transduction pathways that allow you to respond to exquisitely precise stimuli. You don't care that your phenotype is flexible based on changes in transcription. You don't care that your billions of neurons have traveled so specific targets during their development all based largely on calcium concentration and the post synaptic membrane protein composition. You don't care that fruits and vegetables contain antioxidants to limit DNA damage, chelators to prevent metal toxicity, hormone like molecules to enhance cellular function, and common sugars and nutrients to provide energy. None of this matters to you. All you care about is that your esophagus is near your trachea.

No one ever cares about all the charity work I did. Or all the times I helped old ladies across the street. Or the many and varied inventions I made which helped society. Everyone just keeps going on about the five or six times I walked into a public building and shot everyone in the face for no reason.

You're analogy would be better if you say that you donated $15 trillion to charity, donated your kidney to a dying homeless man, spent 40 years of your life teaching children how to live effective lives..... Then some people (like atheists in the analogy) complain that you stole a loaf of bread to feed your starving child.

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I just don't even know how to reply to some of this stuff.

People who think humans are "designed" realized eating plants was "good for us" quicker than people who don't subscribe to such a belief? What can I possibly say to that? Considering even now most of the world are religious, and for ages belief in design has been dominant, I don't even know what the complaint is. Any progress that was going to be made had plenty of time. But in fact, the progress has come when people set aside their religious beliefs (where applicable) to do proper science.

Now, taken for what it is, the human form is truly astonishing when you consider it came about through nothing more than random changes and natural selection (after life began somehow). But if you instead have someone choosing to arrange things how they are, then it becomes stupid. It becomes not impressive at all. And if that someone also created the rules in the first place, and created all these weird obstacles so that it could overcome them with all these strange parts of our body, it becomes laughable.

I think our friend is here is confused as to whether the human species was designed, the materials of life were designed, or the "way evolution works" was designed. The first is blatantly untrue, since we already know what we evolved from. The second and third are already attributed to whatever pissweasel designed our reality in the first place, so there's no extra design involved here.

Where is the design stage? What was done? How? With what? By who? What mechanism? Why?

Edit: Of course, "impressive" is subjective. Some people are very easily impressed.

When you view nature as a designed system, you quickly realize that plant based diets should have extreme health benefits. This is something that is (believe it or not) still not widely acknowledged by some of my professors. One of them said that it is a fallacy that natural foods are healthier. He said that chemistry is just based on electrons and it doesn't matter where they come from. I still can't believe he would say something like that when the evidence is so clearly the opposite. But do you think he would have made that claim if he thought it was designed?

And don't assert that life becomes unimpressive when you think it was set up the way it is on purpose. As far as I'm concerned, that is just a statement of extreme ignorance. And once again, we do not need to show the mechanism of design to infer design.

And yes impressive is subjective, but I think that you think that by saying you are not impressed you are reflecting some higher knowledge in yourself. In other words, if you don't find our biology impressive, then that must mean you understand it, right? You must have some higher knowledge of something more impressive that has caused you to be desensitized to the level of the biological functioning.

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1. If you are pointing and laughing, then you must not realize how impressive the organisms are on the molecular and cellular level. You don't care about the fact that most of your genes can be transcribed forward and backwards to produce different products. You don't care that your RNA can be differentially spliced or edited to produce functional variation. You don't care that your cells can release compounds in vesicles that can travel throughout the body to communicate with other cells. You don't care that you have a blood brain barrier to protect your most valuable organ from environmental stressors. You don't care about the intricate signal transduction pathways that allow you to respond to exquisitely precise stimuli. You don't care that your phenotype is flexible based on changes in transcription. You don't care that your billions of neurons have traveled so specific targets during their development all based largely on calcium concentration and the post synaptic membrane protein composition. You don't care that fruits and vegetables contain antioxidants to limit DNA damage, chelators to prevent metal toxicity, hormone like molecules to enhance cellular function, and common sugars and nutrients to provide energy. None of this matters to you. All you care about is that your esophagus is near your trachea.

Sure, that's a lot of scientific terms, well done. But it's still a rubbish design, considering the magic designer you're too dishonest to admit you're talking about is meant to have infinite power and resources. Or does it not?

2. The scientific community would have enhanced respect for biological systems. They would not come up with ridiculous theories like neutral constructive evolution to explain away RNA editing machinery. Instead, they would understand that RNA editing has a function (namely to expand the information contained in a given DNA sequence). Nobody would have predicted junk DNA (one of the worst scientific predictions of all time). The conclusion that plant foods are better for us would have come much sooner as well. 

This is all so vague I have no idea how to even respond to it. You seem to be making up ret-con predictions and making meaningless statements. What is "enhanced respect", and why does it matter?

Nobody would have predicted junk DNA? What are you talking about? Are you suggesting there's no such thing as junk DNA? Or that... it was a bad thing it was predicted?

3. Why is design magic to you? Did it take magic to design your laptop? Things are designed all the time without magic.

It's not magic to me. It's magic to you. Remember the God you're too dishonest to admit you're talking about? How does "God" design and create things? Why won't you tell us?

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Seriously...

You think any actual practical use comes out of believing the statement, "Life is designed"? That's all we're talking about here. No one is offering up any specifics at all.

Obviously, life forms work as a fairly coherent system. That's why they've survived. People are already aware of this. How exactly does "it's designed" make any difference? No explanation was given above for point 2, just strange claims.

Are you kidding me?? You are seriously just going to assert that it is still a rubbish design despite all of the intricate processes that I've described. Do we need to take one example in depth for you to see how amazing it is? I am actually offended that someone can just ignore all of the processes that I mentioned by basically saying "yeah that's nice, but the design is still garbage".  And once again, just because a design is not perfect does not mean that the designer could not have extreme wisdom. A flaw in the design could be explained as a necessary functional constraint (why aren't all neurons extremely wide? it would allow the messages to travel faster, but it would be an unneeded obstruction), a degradation of a previously good system (like every disease), or a misunderstanding of function (the appendix).

I am suggesting that junk DNA was one of the worst predictions ever made. They almost didn't sequence this portion of the genome which would have been the biggest scientific mistake of all time. This "junk" DNA has so many funcitons including guiding chromatin modifications, guiding alternative splicing, guiding RNA editing, organizing nuclear domains etc. 

And I already did provide a possible explanation for how it was designed. The designer simply formed amino acids and nucleotide building blocks using organic chemistry. The designer then ligated them together in a desired sequence to form proteins and DNA. Other cellular components were also arranged based on knowledge of chemistry and a plan. I have no way of knowing if this is right, but design does not have to be magic.

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I don't see a receding pocket of ignorance, I see a continuous decline in possible alternative explanations.

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I don't have to provide a mechanism by which the designer designed the system. Given that logic, you do not believe that your computer was designed, because you almost certainly do not know how they did it.

Are you suggesting that there does not exist physical, observable, testable, repeatable evidence demonstrating how computers are designed, lol?

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Congratulations.  How about your car? Do you design those? Do you know how it was designed? The point is that we don't have to know how something was designed to rationally infer that it was.

But if you WANTED to learn how your car was designed you could, because the science and technology actually exist.  The mechanisms of said design are reproducible and demonstrable.  They have been studied, tested, improved upon, taught, implemented, and...surprise!  You drive a car along with the rest of us.  Your analogy is...not a good one.

You are missing the point. I don't have to know how something was designed to rationally conclude that it was. And it isn't like we are just looking at biological systems and saying that it just looks designed, it is that we have dissected them to their most fundamental levels in many cases, and intelligent design currently stands alone as the only known force capable of producing it.

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And I don't think that you can just credit the crowning achievements of biologists to the theory of evolution. The fact is that the theory results in many similar predictions that one would make from design. We also don't know how quickly science would progress if people had design as their point of reference. It may be faster.

The theory of evolution explains complexity in a simpler fashion than does your idea of design.  It does not require a designer.

You have no evidence of a designer.  Until you do, your argument is specious.

It absolutely does,

Unsupported assertion.

but that's not even what I was trying to convey.

What were you trying to convey?

We are less susceptible to diseases and infections if we eat plant based foods and exercise.

Unsupported assertion.  
Eating meat is a more efficient means of nutrition than a purely plant-based diet.  We have evolved as omnivores.

Therefore, those who do not live this healthy lifestyle are more likely to be removed by the purifying force that is infection. At least this is a possibility.

Purifying force?  Are you serious?

You can't just assert that evolution is an adequate cause. How much information per generation does natural selection coupled with mutation produce? How many generations have there been? How much information is contained by the genome. Until we know the answer to all three of these we will not know if natural selection+mutation is adequate. 

And you don't think that lifestyle impacts our genetic output? That's like the whole point of epigenetics. Environmental stimuli lead to heritable changes in transcription. Eating meat is not a more efficient means of nutrition. Nut consumption has a much higher assimilation efficiency than meat. Also, you have to consider that the meat itself has disseminated most of the energy of the primary producers when it was alive. Therefore, skipping the middle man is a much more efficient way to eat from an energy perspective.