Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Esquilax]

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?

Because, again, information does not have a cause. It is the product of minds extrapolating from identified patterns. Even a book, an actually intelligently designed object, does not contain information: the human mind that wrote it understood the commonly agreed upon patterns of language, and transcribed symbols through which others with an understanding of that same pattern might come to obtain the same message the author wished to impart. The pattern itself is merely an intermediary, it has information content only in the sense that minds can extrapolate from it. If the mind that beheld it had no concept of the language it was written in, the book is simply gibberish. Information is reliant on minds to exist.

But minds don't just obtain information from intelligent sources, to head off what I suspect to be your next rhetorical trick, since I used an example that was intelligently designed. Just look up pareidolia if you want an example of that.

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.

And if you were to portray that conclusion honestly, it would look like this: "design is the only cause of information I know/am willing to consider, therefore it's the only one." In other words, precisely the argument from ignorance that you've insisted it isn't.

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." 

So, first of all: your explanation does not simply get to be the default simply because you have it. I've shown that your conclusion is untenable on its own- it either leads to an infinite regress or naturally occurring information somewhere- so even though it might be the only conclusion you're willing to entertain, since it doesn't work, it doesn't get to just be the thing you assume. Having an answer and having an answer that's possible are two different things. The fact that you only reach that conclusion through a deep, deep misunderstanding of the nature of information, and an unwillingness to relinquish the answer you want to be true, just makes this worse.

And secondly, no matter how thorough the search, if the basis for you accepting one answer is that nobody has been able to come up with another one, that's an argument from ignorance. Sorry, I know you don't like that, but that's not the same thing as it being untrue.

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.

I'm not disagreeing that DNA contains information. I'm disagreeing with your notions of what information is and how it works, something you've proceeded to both misunderstand and just dismiss out of hand here. Do you have any actual support for your bald, fiat assertion that information doesn't have to be read by minds, or that information in genes is somehow basally different from temperature or positional information, or is your argument there truly just "nuh uh!"?

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?

Why do I not? Well, for one, it's because I harbor no illusions as to my area of expertise. I'm a writer, if you want a novel written, come to me, I'm good with a turn of phrase. But I'm not a biologist, and you shouldn't come to me for conclusions of a biological nature, as I don't have the education to interpret the results accurately. For the same reason, you shouldn't put me in charge of a nuclear submarine, or a factory that makes cars. Not my field of study.

You're free to interpret the data any way you wish, but don't pretend for a second that all interpretations are created equal. You're asking that I accept the interpretation of some random, uneducated internet commenter over that of a series of trained scientists, and I don't know why you would ever ask anyone to do that. You're also, by the way, still running up against this problem where you're asking that we take the information these papers produce as accurate, up until the point it diverges from your design idea.

Seems to me that the yardstick you're using for whether a conclusion is good here is how much that conclusion aligns with your presupposed ID ideas, and has nothing to do with empiricism or evidence, no matter your pretenses to intellectual rigor.