Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

Why is it that proponents of ID always focus on animals that they find pretty and ignore stuff like Yersinia pestis or HIV?

Yersinia pestis's design is not less impressive than the pretty fish. But because atheists suddenly become blind when it comes to the apparent design of various life forms, presenting good-looking animals is a good way to bring them back to their senses.

Not to mention that posting a picture of a pretty fish is very shallow because mandarindish is known to be foul-smelling and is covered in tiny spines to inject a toxic mucus into anyone who tries to handle and/or eat it in an ocean filled with creatures that can kill you in an instant.

So what? To me, the toxic mucus is yet another impressive display of the power of the designer. 

As ever, the thing you think stands in contradiction to fact.  For better or for worse....and regardless of whether there is a god, and regardless of whether or  not you believe that god belief is natural...whatever that means... it will remain a fact that the strongest predictor of religiousity and even specific beliefs..is whether or not they were held by your parents.  

Be careful there.. you might mistake correlation for causation. Just because my parents' belief are on average correlated with mine doesn't mean it's a decisive factor or cause.

Why would I agree to that?  As far as I can tell, gods aren't capable of doing anything - but, again, if you'd like to point out where god touches the genetics, you're free to do so...and if you would prefer to assert that genetics "takes care of things", instead, then you can no longer point to any need for god in genetics or fish.   

You seem to misunderstand what inference means. You live in a world where we have the following observation : children naturally give functional/teleological explanations to things. 
This observation doesn't entail that God exists, of course. I am not attempting a deductive argument, but an inductive one.

This observation is better explained under theism than under atheism. One would expect children to be god-tilted in a world with god, it's much less likely to happen in a godless world. That's the nature of an inductive argument. And rejecting it means that you don't care much about what we observe in this world, or you are trying to block the conclusion that theism is a better explanation of the world.

If you say that the god hypothesis is not empirically testable, then it isn't testable by the way things appear.  Your fish argument fails, according to you.

The existence of pretty fish is a premise in an inductive, a posterori argument, and in fact, any appearance of design can be used as a premise to infer a designer. But the designer entity itself is not empirically detectable in the same way we can detect the presence of an animal by their footprints. We infer from observating the world that a designer intervened at some point and started the entire thing, without needing to "locate" the designer.