Is atheism a scientific perspective?

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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?

It isn't an argument from ignorance. How do you not understand how our repeated experience of the cause and effect relationship of information coupled with the presence of large amounts of information necessary for life is positive evidence of design? Pay attention closely, because it's about the 23243234th time it's been said: the conclusion that design is the only known cause for sequential information is based on WHAT WE DO KNOW about the origin of information.

All that you people do is shout that things are arguments from ignorance. let's get this settled now, so I don't have to keep addressing it. It's not "I don't know how it got there, therefore God". It's "despite a thorough search over the course of more than half a century by the world's brightest minds, not a single person has ever been able to propose another possible explanation to explain the origin of the sequential information contained within DNA other than that it was the product of intelligence. Intelligence is repeatedly shown to be capable of producing the phenomenon, therefore it is the best current explanation." 

And again, we aren't talking about temperature/positional information. We are talking about information in the form of a sequence of characters that is read to accomplish a desired function. You clearly haven't read Meyer's book. He goes to great lengths to describe the type of information in DNA. Information does not have to be read by minds. I know no biologist who disagrees with the proposition that DNA contains information. Titles of chapters in my textbooks about the DNA and RNA use words like "informational macromolecules". It's not something that the ID community just made up. And we've already talked about how information is hard to quantify, but that it is not necessary to quantify it to draw conclusions based on the qualitative nature.

As for the articles, don't even worry about distinguishing between speculation and empiricism if you don't want to. Just read them. I put them there because they use words in ways that you say were made up by the ID community. And yeah, I think we ought to have our own interpretation of the results. Why do you not?

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So we have what humans make, which is a product of intelligent design. And we have some other things, not made by humans, which have some similarities to things humans make. And the argument boils down to 'if things humans make are the product of intelligent design, these other things MUST also be a product of intelligent design.'

Without knowing anything at all about the 'other things' being talked about, we've got a hasty generalization fallacy.

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.

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Wouldn't you be interested to know how it adds antenna shapes? These shapes, I presume, are preprogrammed functional units, the differential combination of which leads to different function. This would be drastically different then the process of mutation, which most often takes the form of a single nucleotide change. If the mechanism of phenotypic variation among biological entities was simply the semirandom organization of preprogrammed units (lets say whole exons), then I would not be surprised to see enhanced function. It is only when you appeal to extremely small changes in the genetic code that the mechanism becomes hard to believe.

Not the point.  It's an example of a non-intelligent process leading to specified information in your sense of the terms.  That makes your argument that intelligence and living systems are the only thing we know that produces this type of information incorrect.  And you still haven't responded to the checkers playing neural nets as a counter example as well. (See https://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/12...ornby).pdf for an example antenna construction sequence.)

Then there's the following:

It actually is crucial to examining the analogy. These shape are predetermined as options. Life does not work that way. There is no predetermined shape/structure. Not only that, but every structure relies on probably hundreds (maybe even thousands by the time you consider the code necessary to produce the enzymes that manufacture it) of nucleotides. We aren't just adding structures at random. Any major structure would arise only after many mutations occurred in precise locations to the correct base within the context of a system capable of using this new structure once it somehow manages to form.