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>>Why, exactly, is the possibility of a superior intelligence having intervened on this planet “unscientific?”<<

The main trouble with intelligence in general (let alone superior intelligence) is that attempting to define it scientifically basically reduces it to a logical absurdity.

As one of my philosophy professors in college pointed out, all chemistry can be reduced to physics. (Chemistry is basically an augmented kind of atomic physics: studying and applying the motion of a whole lot of atoms and molecules at once instead of individually.) Arguably, one can also reduce the functioning of your brain down to chemistry and physics (neurons firing, various hormones being released, etc.)

Now for a question that causes a lot of controversy: does this mean your mind can also be reduced to chemistry and physics? A materialist believes so; dualists, idealists, and certain other believers in immaterial and supernatural forms believe otherwise. If the materialists are right, you are no more than a very complex biochemical machine; and as such, everything you think and do is predetermined. To be sure, recent discoveries in quantum physics might keep your fellow humans from being able to study these processes closely enough to predict every one of your actions, but it remains that you have no real free will. Chemistry and physics determine everything you do. Intelligence is merely another natural force.

If the materialists are wrong (and I believe they are), then you do have free will; this derives, however, from something other than your brain. Plato would have pointed to his forms, Epicurus would have referred to a mysterious force which causes the atoms in your brain to swerve from what would otherwise be their naturally determined course, and Christians (among others) would say that it derives from your soul. The problem with this? All of these are supernatural forces. Science can only study natural forces. Intelligence is therefore unscientific.

If intelligence is merely biochemistry, then an intelligent designer is entirely scientific; however, he (she? it?) is also bound entirely by natural laws. Everything an intelligent designer does is driven by the same laws of chemistry and physics that drive you to design and build things. This doesn’t preclude the possibility of the supernatural existing, or the intelligent designer in question being an omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient God operating from beyond our space-time continuum, but it does render these possibilities unnecessary.

If intelligence is supernatural, then we are daily dealing with an unscientific and yet very real force that has many very immediate and obvious impacts on our scientifically observable world, and yet does not lend itself to scientific study. That something could be very real and true and yet unscientific is very disagreeable to people who equate the word “scientific” with real. (Thanks to our materialistic pop culture, this is quite massive number, maybe even a solid majority.) In this scenario, an intelligent designer is this disagreeable situation writ large: a creator not bound by any natural laws and not subject to any scientific study.

From where I stand, this is the very unpopular position that I hold: that God is very real, supernatural and completely unbound by natural laws, and therefore unscientific. Also, I believe in a very real, very unscientific, miraculous creation. I believe there have been some very real, very unscientific miracles since then: there is no scientific formula for turning water into wine, resurrecting the dead, or ascending into Heaven. I believe in a literal six-day miraculous creation (granted, some of it taking place before this planet was here to make any rotations on its axis by which to measure days), completed six-to-ten-thousand years ago give or take a few thousand years. (Some of those genealogies in Genesis may have been condensed.)

I also believe in the Garden of Eden, the tragic Fall of man and subsequent expulsion from this garden, and an intelligently directed re-design of nature thereafter to enable nature to fight back against the destructive tendencies our sinful nature produces in us. That’s why we, who’ve dominated the world and driven several species to extinction, still regularly fall prey to bacteria and viruses too small to see; why some species breed explosively and consume our resources, forcing us to fight them for our sustenance; while others are large and deadly predators and still others are fitted with quills and fangs and venom to be a constant danger to humanity and all the other species.

I do not believe in evolution because it is not historical, not necessary to creating anything in this universe, and is not particularly necessary to any academic discipline whatsoever, scientific or otherwise, except for materialist mythology. Chemistry, physics, biology, cosmology, economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, and all other disciplines have gotten along just fine without evolution, and will continue to get along fine without it when it ultimately is thrown into the same scrap heap of failed ideas as our pagan ancestors’ studies in sorcery, our medieval ancestors’ Aristotelian biology and cosmology, and more recent ancestors’ forays into phrenology, Communism, Lysenkoism, and punctuated equilibrium.

The elimination of evolution as a viable idea will occur around roughly the same time as the collapse of our welfare state, leading to the subsequent death of the so-called “scientific community” whose government-subsidized studies in materialist mythology will have absolutely no practical application to the chaotic situation at hand, whereupon natural selection (yes, that’s a real enough phenomenon; I’ve seen it happen) will weed them out. I do hope and pray I shall live to see that day, terrible as it’s likely to be.