> > And what about those questions which science can not settle? I use cold hard reason to weigh the alternatives and choose the simplest explanation of things. After all, if we'll never know exactly why something is a certain way, why not at least simplify our thinking?
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> That's a good method. However, one common problem there is that people often choose the simplest method after discarding the supernatural as a possibility. To quote William Craig (as quoted in The Case For Faith):
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That's because choosing the supernatural explanation after running out of natural explanations amounts to saying, "Well, we looked really hard for a way to explain this, but nothing's come up yet, so we'll just say it can't be explained and be done with it." If you can't solve a problem, you wait for more methods and wisdom to come along. It make take a very long time, but you don't give up and say that the supernatural explanation is plausible.

This brings up an interesting point. How do you know that an explanation is supernatural? It may seem to rely on something not explainable by currently understood laws of the universe, but that may be just because we don't have the laws formulated completely yet. At one point, gravity could have been considered a supernatural force pulling everything downward. On the other hand, something could be essentially supernatural, in that no matter how much we learn about the universe, it has an operating basis outside of nature. In this sense, I *don't* think that 'supernatural' explanations should be discarded completely, but rather kept in the back of the mind as evidence that may help extend the boundaries of the part of the natural world that is known. When the formerly 'supernatural' becomes tied in with a larger, still consistent body of knowledge, it becomes natural and can be considered part of a plausible explanation. But not before then.

> "Logicians have a term: 'inference to the best explanation.' This means you have a body of data to be explained, and then you have a pool of live options or various explanations for that data. You need to choose which explanation from that pool would, if true, best explain the observed data. Some skeptics, however, will not allow supernatural explanations even to be in the pool of live options. Consequently, if there is no natural explanation for an event, they're simply left with ignorance. That's prejudice. Apart from some proof of atheism, there's no warrant for excluding supernatural explanations from being a member of the pool of live options. If you do put them in that pool, then you've got to be an open, honest investigator to see which is the best explanation of any given event."
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Once again, there's a difference between possibility and plausibility. Some people may rule out supernatural explanations as possibilities immediately; that's obviously a bad thing. If we never tried to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge, we wouldn't get anywhere. However, some classes of supernatural phenomena, such as psychic powers, ghosts, etc., have repeatedly (in thousands, if not *millions* of circumstances) been offered as explanations for events, but not *once* have these claims been substantiated. This is getting way off topic, but I bring it up as an example of when unsubstantiated supernatural explanations should be *almost* discarded immediately.

> The point here is that for a lot of scientific problems, scientists run out of reasonable explantions, but do not take the supernatural alternative. Objection #3 in the same book shows fairly clearly how the theory of evolution is sound, but a purely natural theory of evolution continues to fail to show how life came about in the first place. All modern naturalist explanations for the origins of life (at least all the ones I have ever heard of) have been shown to be incapable of fully explaining how life could come about at random under any circumstance. In such a case, the simplest explanation then has to be supernatural--in fact, with all other explanations being shown to be nonsensical, the existence of a divine being who can do anything becomes pretty much the only available solution. The common counter-argument to this is to say "Wait and we'll find something better in the future." However, this denies one of the basic tenets of science--that we should come up with an explantion based on our current data. Waiting around for more data does not seem to me to be a reasonable solution when we already have a plausible explanation sitting right in front of us.
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I don't buy that at all. Science is not about getting the best answers right away. It's about continually striving to learn more and more about how things work. Possibly the end goal is to know how everything works, but I seriously doubt that is feasible. You may say that the biggest leaps in science were taken when people made extraordinary claims or theories which were ignored and ridiculed at first before becoming widely accepted . However, these claims are inherently *testable* through natural methods. Scientists are undoubtedly coming up with really wild theories about how life originated on our planet, and most will be discarded with further observation and testing. The supernatural explanation, that a divine being placed life here, can not be disproved, but that doesn't mean we should accept it as a plausible explanation unless you can tie it in to a larger body of knowledge (i.e. by observing said divine being creating life on other planets). We'll never discard it, but we'll keep searching until we find a solution that fits in with our system of natural laws. Patience is a necessity.

--gremlinn