What exactly does "throwning it under the bus" mean, and who's asking you to do it?
I rather thought you were, when you wrote this:
The comment that was in reply to seemed to amount to an argument that because the methodology used to investigate something had to be intelligently designed it was evidence that what was being investigated must have also been intelligently designed.So I gathered you were not terribly impressed by the import of the little graphic in my last!
Natural Law theory ["NLT"] holds that the natural world is intelligibly ordered, and can be addressed to and by a commensurately intelligibly ordered self or mind. In other words, there is a direct correspondence between the two orders that can be expressed in terms of mathematics and logic. Some would argue that it is the mathematics itself that gives the natural world and all its contents (including selves) its order.
Here we see a "bleed-over" from mathematics into the realm of philosophy, into epistemology and ontology respectively. Which is what NLT axiomatically states and unifies. This axiom, like all axioms, cannot be further analyzed into more basic logical "parts," or statements. It is, as they say, a "self-evident truth."
Either it's that, or nothing at all. [E.g., it's been "thrown under the bus."]
Many people have many reasons to object to NLT today, as too constraining to their own theoretical projects. But here's a spectacular example of the nihilistic insanity (IMHO) that can happen when Natural Law theory is deliberately abandoned — "Blobjectivism and Indirect Correspondence," by the analytic philosophers Terry Horgan and Matjaz Potrc.
Have fun dipping into that one, dear tacticalogic!
Possibly you would say that none of this "stuff" has anything to do with science. But I would say epistemology and ontology are implicit in the conduct of science and always have been.