Well, yes, that is how science is done. No teleological or supernatural explanations are permitted.
I note that the writers do not offer an alternative model to explain what is observed. Can they?
Can anyone?
"This discussion is not really about God at all, but about the truth claims of methodological naturalism in dealing with the unobservable past. Even if one finds the right settings of the knobs that produce a resemblance to these bodies, how would one know the model is true? By tweaking parameters in a model, which is not reality but a simplification of it, the modeler has only applied his or her intelligent design to achieve a correspondence between an imaginary prehistory and the actual history of the world. Is the correspondence real or contrived? If it feels satisfying to discover a correspondence, how is this feeling validated? When a whole class of causes (specifically, intelligent causes) has been ruled out from the get-go, then what remains must be forced to fit even when it does not fit very well."
" Well, yes, that is how science is done. No teleological or supernatural explanations are permitted."
It's interesting that he paraphrases John Locke in the second paragraph. Locke was a philosopher and contempory of Isaac Newton.
Locke's notion of primary and secondary cause as well as primary and secondary qualities are a relic of eighteenth century philosophy when philosophers were attempting to reconcile theology with the emerging scientifice revolution.
No modern philosopher or scientist would use these terms while discussing modern science.
Plus none of the English Empiricists argued that theological terms were necessary in order to explain the natural world, including Bishop Berkeley.
This guy is trying to make it seem like