Natural selection certainly is not random.Sure it's scientific. Saying it's not is like a biologist saying that we know a lot about the biology of blunt-force trauma, including how much force, applied where, will kill a person, and then a gadfly piping up and challenging him to predict who's going to die from a blunt-force trauma vs. who's going to die of old age. He can't, but that's irrelevant to whether his specialty is scientific or not. (But the gadfly still walks away feeling trimphant. :-)Nor is it scientific. If it were, it could predict the state of species way down the road, especially given millions of years of its so-called "observed" history. Natural selection is an arbitrary determination made after species have performed as they were designed to perform, namely, within their intended limits.
Last time I checked, biologists who know about blunt force trauma confine themselves to examining the immediate evidence as it pertains to blunt force trauma. Or do they also fantasize about how life as we know it came from simpler forms apart from either intelligence or design? Natural selection is not presented only as an explanantion of current speciation (within limits) but also as an explanation for the diverse species as developed from simpler to more complex forms.
That's a crevo thread in a nutshell, yes! Every heckler sitting on an upended crate is a Nobel Prize scientist.
Natural selection is a fancy name for the observation that, if your ancestors had no offspring, you will have no offspring, either.