Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Esquilax]

I figured by saying that DNA arises naturally you were talking about abiogenesis. And the only reason that it replicates in the first place is because of the sequence of characters that instruct the sequence of the daughter strand. Not to mention the helicases, single stranded binding proteins, topoisomerases, primases, DNA polymerases, and all the other estimated 100 + enzymes necessary for its replication in vivo. Don't forget the need for it to be protected from its environment. Thank evolution it happens to have a cell wall made of peptidoglycan which are produced via a biochemical pathway involving many enzymes. Thank evolution it has the ability to ligate them together and regulate what comes in and out. All of this is based on pre-existing information. The question being addressed is the ultimate origin of information. Obviously it is there now. The question is whether intelligence is the only known cause capable of producing it.

This is precisely the argument from ignorance I was talking about: name a bunch of things that seem complicated to a layman, and then because you don't know how they could have arisen naturally, there must have been an intelligence behind it. Not gonna fly here.

As I said before, though, just because DNA replicates a specific way now, does not mean that this is the only way it could replicate, nor even that it's a style of replication that would actually suit DNA if it arose in a different, less complex form than it takes today. You're making a series of entirely unjustified assumptions in order to suit your case, and while that might be comforting to your pre-established conclusions, if we don't know a thing, then there's no reason to just assume stasis in the way DNA works, in particular in light of the fact that we already see a trend of upward complexity in every other aspect of biology.

And the positive evidence (as I have repeated) is this. Cells contain information in the form of a sequence of characters that is read and interpreted to produce a desired function. (If you disagree with this, then you are disagreeing with every biology student/professor/textbook I have ever encountered (which is fine if you have good reason)). Intelligent input is repeatedly shown to be capable of producing sequential information. No other mechanism has been shown to be adequate. Therefore, based on our uniform and repeated experience, intelligence is the best current explanation (you should read Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. He develops this argument). 

So, again: argument from ignorance.

Moreover, information is commonplace. Chemistry produces information, obviously, but it's hardly alone in this: physical matter, for example, produces positional information, temperature information, information regarding movement... information is a function of minds capable of seeing patterns and extrapolating from them, not some inherent quantity that needs to be "produced." I don't disagree that cells contain information, but I certainly disagree with your notions regarding what information is, and your claim that intelligent input is the only thing adequate for producing sequential information, because it's not. This is sort of the problem I have with these sorts of arguments, which is that Meyer simply decides that information is some special category of thing that DNA has but other things don't, relying on the idea that people won't consider what information actually is when they read it.

Information is not produced, it is "read" by minds after the fact. If you disagree, then please produce one objective quantity of information. Not a quantity of some other thing that contains information when read by a mind, but the actual information itself, as the objectively real thing your language is claiming it is. You can't, because you're just arguing from both ignorance and analogy.

And the articles that I will leave use the words specific and such to describe cellular processes. And do you really expect me to be able to tell you why a person believes what they do? Just read the article and think for yourself instead of being concerned with what the authors believe.\

Aaaaaand now you've tipped your hand.

Well, for the second time- let's not forget that you were dismissing the peer review process as biased against you just a few pages ago, yet now you're crowing about how peer reviewed your citations are where you think they support you- but that's just icing on the cake at this point. Because, see, the beliefs of the authors are actually kind of important here: they're trained to have educated, accurate conclusions on this subject, for one. For another, you're proffering the information in these papers as accurate and worthy of consideration, which necessarily means that their conclusions are worthy of that too. Far more worthy than your own conclusions, for that matter, owing to their education.

What you're saying here, if you don't mind me cutting through your pretenses to intellectual rigor, is that the writers of these papers should be trusted to provide accurate information... right up until the point that they begin to stray from your presupposed conclusion. At that point, oh, we should all make up our own conclusions and think for ourselves... isn't that convenient?

As to the actual papers themselves, I'm afraid you're arguing from ignorance again. Do you have an actual point regarding them, other than that you can't think of a way they could arise naturally?