I said in my last post (the part you redacted) that biologists state clearly that hypotheses surrounding the origins of life are speculative. Even the Nobel Prize winning biologist quoted in your last post says this. As I have mentioned before, supernatural explanations lie outside the bounds of scientific investigation. It is unsurprising that "those who are studying the origin of life" would investigate naturalist hypotheses. What other line of reasoning should people in the physical sciences pursue?
"... Nobody knows how it happened but, somehow, without violating the laws of physics and chemistry, a molecule arose that just happened to have the property of self-copying—a replicator. This may seem like a big stroke of luck... Freakish or not, this kind of luck does happen... [and] it had to happen only once... What is more, as far as we know, it may have happened on only one planet out of a billion billion planets in the universe. Of course many people think that it actually happened on lots and lots of planets, but we only have evidence that it happened on one planet, after a lapse of half a billion to a billion years."What is irksome to me is that someone like Dawkins routinely make absolute claims of fact about the earth's history, for which he claims there is evidence, but he says that nobody knows how it happened. Is that what you mean by "hypotheses surrounding the origins of life are speculative"? If these purported events are merely conjecture then why are they continually presented as facts of natural history in the continuum of evolution from the Big Bang to Michael Jackson? And since natural history really is an unbroken continuum of events, why, other that practical reasons of scope of research, would one second prior to the beginning of macro-evolution be out of bounds of evolution and not one second after the beginning, other than merely by an argument from definition?
It is unsurprising that "those who are studying the origin of life" would investigate naturalist hypotheses. What other line of reasoning should people in the physical sciences pursue?
There is a difference between philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism. If science is to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm methodologically (this itself is a metaphysical assumption) then in any putative naturalistic accounting of history the term ‘evolution’ cannot logically be excluded from the emergence of any thing that exists, including the beginning of life, or the universe itself because the universe began and has ‘evolved’ to what it is today.
It seems to me that if such questions are entirely speculation, or conjecture because we really don't know what happened, then it is not science to assert that events happened of which we are ignorant.
Cordially,