Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Esquilax]

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And I don't think that you can just dismiss the arguments that ID proponents make by asserting that it is a conspiracy theory set up by the religious to corrupt science.

Well we can presume that ID is exactly that because it is what the fundy creatards who created ID stated in their foundational document. The "Wedge strategy" memo, which has long been available and long been acknowledged by the discovery "institute" as being theirs and factually correct, explicitly states that the whole idea is to get creatardism taught in schools through rebranding as ID (and not explicitly naming yhwh), and pretending that there is a controversy in evolutionary biology, i.e. the science isn't settled and that "many scientists" are being blackmailed into not speaking out against "Darwinism".

If that is not religion trying to corrupt science then I don't even.

For an even more vivid example of this, and in fact a smoking gun that amounted to legal proof that ID is merely creationism disguised to corrupt science, we need only look at "Of Pandas and People."

For those not in the know, Pandas was a 1989 biology textbook described by real scientists as "a wholesale distortion of modern biology," published by a non-profit organization founded by a minister and devoted to preaching the gospel, written and edited by creationists including one of the fathers of the ID movement, Charles Thaxton, with contributions from Stephen C Meyer, whom AAA has already cited as a good source in this thread. Funny how he insists ID isn't creationism, but cites a fucking creationist as his source.

Now, normally, just seeing the originators of ID writing creationist biology textbooks in association with christian ministers and the very people AAA swears up and down are just good ID scientists and totally not creationists would be enough, but we can do better. We can find the transitional form between creationism and ID, showing that, to the people who founded the movement, the two terms mean the same damn thing. See, in 1987, the Edwards vs Aguillard Supreme Court case ruled that creationism couldn't be taught in schools; drafts of the Pandas textbook from before this time used the term creationism freely, but after 1987 those same drafts suddenly switched to using ID... except for one, which used ID and, in one notable instance, "cdesign proponentsists."

What had happened was that the editors were simply finding instances of the words "creation," or "creationists," and replacing them with "intelligent design," and "design proponents," without changing any of the structure of the text beyond that. The book was literally just creationist arguments, with the names swapped out, only they fucked up in one instance and left telltale traces of what they were doing. You can actually find drafts of this damn thing and compare: the only thing that changes is the relevant nouns. If that's not enough, Thaxton himself later admitted that yes, the term intelligent design was only included because he was looking for a way not to say creationism in the book.

So tell us again how ID isn't a religiously based attempt to confound science, AAA.