Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

Well, we have three surviving letters of Joan’s, so that’s a pretty convincing empirical test.

That's not what would be called a test. You may want to review how designing experiments and hypothesis testing are actually done. 

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.

How did an immaterial “thing” design and create a physical world? I mean, this is your god after all. Since he was the The Cause. what was his mechanism of action?

Nobody can answer that, @LadyForCamus . I can't even tell how the microchip inside my computer was designed in detail.

But not knowing the mechanism of action doesn't prevent us from knowing the physical world was designed. I don't need to study nanoelectronics to know that my computer was designed.

But Kloro doesn’t seem able to grasp that, just as historiography is an empirical science, he is unable to grasp that calling apparent design ‘evidence’ is an empirical argument.

I am going to be charitable and assume you didn't read the whole thread. I explained pages ago what a posterori arguments mean. What you have trouble grasping, on the other hand, is the difference between an empirical argument and empirical test/experiment.

It may be impressive, but it is not intelligent or it would be very cruel.

And what is your criteria for a design to qualify as intelligent? A word of warning here: efficiency is not a concern for a designer with infinite resources. Efficiency is only meaningful when we deal with scarce resources. A deity purportedly creates resources ex nihilo.

This shows again how you don't know anything about what you are talking about. Atheists are very well aware of the design of nature and life. It doesn't mean that if atheists don't believe in the intelligent design that they don't see the design. 

If you are aware of the design, you should believe in a designer, otherwise you are dishonest. That's it.

It's useful here to recall a fundamental law of rationality, known as the principle of credulity: "one takes what seems to be so as indeed so". To put it more forcefully, when you go out and see appearances of people around you, you don't conduct experiments to check that pedestrians are not disguised aliens, you accept the appearances and work on the assumption that they are actually people. 

Similarly, when you see the appearance of design, you should accept it as design, and work under this assumption.

To educate yourself read the book "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins.

Recommending a book authored by a militant atheist, how convenient. Dawkins sucks really bad at the philosophy of religion, btw, according to professional reviews of his books written by practicing philosophers.