[donh]

"Are, or are not, laboratories part of the natural world? What you need, to have some traction, is a way to produce life in a lab that somehow suggests the same pathway can't exist in the wilds. How will you do that? How will you concoct a test that will be inherently unduplicatable by nature, given a virtually infinite budget and lab space?"

Then cars and computers are made by natural process. Yet the only natural process that has made any is intelligent design. Until you can show an example of them existing without being built, your argument is a non starter.

There is no scientific quandary about whether or not cars and computers are made by natural processes. This misses the point. Like your failure to specify what life is, your failure to specify what intelligence is continues to make your proposed test so much vapor in the wind. This is just a silly way to avoid letting your deponents separate the argument for supernatural ID from the argument for non-supernatural ID, which, of course, you'd prefer remain confused. If it was natural, then biological science hardly changes an iota, because of your experiment. We just learn we want to look, if possible, further in time and space than we at first thought for life's origins.

If life can be developed a lab, than it was developed by natural means, since labs are natural, and it's success or failure, as far a science is concerned, speaks primarily to the success or failure of natural means. You must constrain the test far more rigorously than is humanly possible, for such a tests failure to RULE OUT EVERY POSSIBLE WAY LIFE MIGHT NATURALLY OCCUR, to actually, seriously be taken to have ruled in favor of non-natural means.

[unlearner]

"Like your failure to specify what life is, your failure to specify what intelligence is continues to make your proposed test so much vapor in the wind."

No, it just means I do not feel like wasting time debating their definitions. They mean what consensus says they mean. That is not arbitrary.

"We just learn we want to look, if possible, further in time and space than we at first thought for life's origins."

If a super natural intervention occurred some time in history which accomplished something which no natural process could do, would your approach be the same? Keep looking, because there must be a natural explanation? You have said that the super natural might exist, but how would you recognize it if it did?

I agree that my test would prove nothing about the super natural, but it does not have a predisposed conclusion either. You seem to require that science assume that their is no super natural, all the while asserting that there could be.