Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[The Grand Nudger]

If fish or anything else look designed...you've offered an empirical means of testing the claim. 

What do you mean by "testing the claim"? Testing has a very precise and scientific meaning in statistics. Namely, it entails the possibility of rejecting the claim if the test has certain outcomes or if a properly formulated null hypothesis is rejected. But in the case of a personal entity that purportedly doesn't follow any physical law, there is no way to rule out its existence. Deism may not be falsifiable, and this is not a problem since falsifiability only apply to scientific theories about the universe.

And I assume you know the famous rule of thumb: absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

 Empirical-

based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.

How things appear..is what...?


It's interesting that you've retreated to deism..because you don't believe in deism. Or do you? Have you abandoned islam? Do you now believe, in retrospect, that islam is demonstrably false but that deism is not defeated by those observations which establish as much?

You're wrong, btw, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The rule, poorly misappropriated by yourself to lose an argument, is that absence of evidence is not proof of absence.