Is atheism a scientific perspective?

[Esquilax]

I just noticed this.  It really bugs the hell out of me when people use the "Sherlock Holmes" the answer.  You know the quote.  "If you eliminate the impossible whatever is left, however improbable, must be the answer."  I fucking hate that quote because morons everywhere think it's so fucking wise.  Most of them don't even know it's a line from a novel set in a fictional universe.

A fictional universe created by Arthur Conan Doyle, a man whose approach to epistemology famously led him to accept the existence of fucking fairies based on some fake-ass photos of girls posing with cardboard cutouts of fairies from a children's book. I like Sherlock Holmes, but Doyle was a writer, and though he may have written about a genius detective, he wasn't one himself. Outside of his writing, he was actually kind of a dopey spiritualist: not the guy you want to be turning to for sage advice on deduction.

Then there's also the elephant in the room with that statement, intelligence is not a "known" cause for natural structures, it's a "believed" cause.  No natural structure has ever been proved to have been "designed" by anything.  In fact, the ONLY designer we are absolutely certain of is humans (unless you count things like beaver dams as being "designed" rather than simple products of instinct, but that's another conversation).  By definition something which is designed "by humans" is not and cannot also be "a natural structure".  Something cannot be both "natural" and "designed by humans".  So, humans being the only designers we are absolutely, unquestionably certain about, the terms "designed" and "naturally occurring" are mutually exclusive terms.  So the comparison between the naturally occurring and things designed specifically be humans to prove the naturally occurring structures are designed by "not humans" is really quite ludicrous because you are comparing two mutually exclusive things.

This sort of betrays the self-serving, arbitrary nature of how people use observations to support ID. AAA is all too happy to point out that intelligence has been observed to produce this and that, but he stops there because it supports his conclusion. It's equally true, under the same premises, that the only intelligences we've observed capable of doing whatever he thinks is being done, are human intelligences. Wouldn't it therefore follow that his own argument concludes that human life was intelligently designed by humans, and that this is the best explanation?

Oh no, but we're just meant to stop at intelligence and not care about what our observations are beyond that point, for some reason...