[snarks_when_bored]

Ben Stein is an engaging personality, a smart guy, a funny actor and a savvy investor. He has every right to believe what he wishes to believe about the results (or what he views as the lack of results) of scientific inquiry. But the question he asks the "dude" professor in his television commercial for this movie is, frankly, silly: asking the professor how he explains life's origin—and thereby implying that if no answer is immediately forthcoming from science, none ever will be—is mere sophistry. Three hundred and fifty or so years ago, skeptics (with amazingly advanced astronomical data somehow in hand!) could have asked Isaac Newton this question: "How do you explain the precession of the perihelion of the orbit of Mercury using your inverse square theory of the gravitational force?", and Newton would have been unable to answer. Why? Because that precession is not predicted by Newton's theory of gravity; it took Einstein's development of his theory of general relativity to explain it.

To suggest, as Ben Stein's funny question suggests, that if a scientific answer to how life came to be cannot be made right this minute, then no scientific answer will be forthcoming, ever, is to suggest something which is false.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

>>But the question he asks the “dude” professor in his television commercial for this movie is, frankly, silly: asking the professor how he explains life’s origin—and thereby implying that if no answer is immediately forthcoming from science, none ever will be—is mere sophistry.<<

I have not seen the movie, but to me, that line in the commercial could mean more than what you stated. Remember that the professor had just asserted that different forms of life are explained by “unguided” and “undesigned” processes. I believe that none of us, including scientists, is smart enough to know the answer to Ben’s question, and some apologists for science are too arrogant. Science has some useful and impressive accomplishments, but it has limitations.

Have you considered the possibility that when humans try to understand life through human science, their understanding is like a worm’s understanding of humans?