Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Asmodee]

There are some interesting replies here about our ability to "infer" design.  When you really think about it, the notion that you can just look at something and say, "That is designed" is pretty ridiculous.  The first problem is, of course, that we have so little experience with design.  Most of what we know to be designed our own species designed.  Everything else which one might claim to be designed, such as beaver dams, are only arguably designed at best.  The beaver doesn't take any measurements or lay out any plans, after all, so it could be argued the damn is simply built without design.  Is it possible that the designs of a super-intelligent alien race a million years ahead of us might be difficult to infer?  We don't know because we've never seen that.  Yes, I suppose it is possible, but we have no way of knowing.  To simply assume that we could look at anything from their planet and tell the designed from the natural is pretty presumptuous, much less from a deity even more advanced.

And arguments about intelligent design are, themselves, deceptions.  The person arguing for intelligent design never admits to you that they're talking about creationism, but even they know they are, making it even worse when they pretend they're not.  The designer, by the nature of existence, must also be the creator, the cause of creation.  It's in the very definition of intelligent design from the senseless death of trees known as Of Pandas and People.

Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc.

Various forms of life "began abruptly".  How?  What does design have to do with "beginning"?  Intelligent design is billed as a competing theory to the theory of evolution, meaning the two are not compatible.  In fact, it rules out evolution completely with its notion of irreducible complexity.  So the designer could not have just designed things and then influenced evolution, it had to actually create everything.  It's talking about creation.  That is creationism.  Yet many ID proponents deny that it is, even though it's very clear that AFTER "designing" everything the "designer" then had to create it all.

And this is what I was saying about having to look carefully for deceptions from Christians.  No, it's not that they're inherently untrustworthy.  But the things they have been taught to believe are.  In the Dover trial it was proved beyond doubt that intelligent design was creationism relabeled, but they all claimed it wasn't.  The definition I gave above, that was originally the definition for "creationism", word for word, in early drafts of the book.  There is no way in hell people working on the book didn't know that it was creationism, but they still claimed (and still do claim) that it wasn't.  I guess the best way to explain it is that I have to watch for secondhand lies from Christians, lies that they were told, believe and retell me.  There are some Christians who will happily lie to me without any internal conflict, but I think most of them would be appalled at the idea of outright lying to me.  But that doesn't meant they tell any fewer lies.  They just convince themselves that the lies they are telling me are "truths".  In fact, it's a bit of a telltale sign when they go out of their way to label them as "truth" that on a subconscious level, they don't really believe it themselves.  Many times in conversations with Christians I have gotten the impression they were trying to convince themselves more than me.