Hello A-G! I think this is often what happens; in which case, it's easy enough to straighten out any prevailing misconceptions by giving clear definitions.
But often enough it seems debates get stalemated, not over definitions, but over intransigent, irreconcilable world views. And this is an intractible problem, from the standpoint of meaningful communication (ooops! we can't use that adjective! -- there is no meaning!!! "What is" just is; so don't go looking for it to mean anything).
For instance, I think some of us here would endlessly disagree about this observation of Einstein's: "If there were not this inner illumination [i.e., the human mind], the universe would be merely a rubbish heap."
Some folks here have a world view that holds the universe, being utterly devoid of consciousness, is simply a gigantic machine that came about by pure random happenstance; or if it should contain consciousness, this really doesn't matter at all: It's still just a gigantic machine that somehow orders itself by means of random chance; and life itself is pointless. Or at least not something that need concern the scientist. He ought to stop at mechanism; for to stress the purpose of this mechanism might skew the science...and get one into philosophy (heaven forfend!). I suppose for some people, even cosmology is suspect.
Other folks have the view that life and consciousness are the entire point of the universe. But in the opinion of "the other side," this is mawkish anthropocentrism pure and simple, and teleological to boot -- and they regard both as disreputable.
One side says the universe is basically just a gigantic "accident," but one which can be approached and explained through, say, information theory, which reduces everything to bits and the lengths of digit sequences, and denies that "information" has anything to do with "meaning." (I'm not saying that information theory is useless to our present questions; just that it is most likely not the whole answer.)
But the "life and consciousness crowd" will think this view ridiculous; for everything in life appears to them to display orderly patterns that cannot be reasonably explained by random accidents just piling up over the eons. Even at the quantum level, beautiful symmetries are being discovered. There is obviously design; and where there is design, there must be a designer.
I note with a certain amusement (bemusement?) that those who say the universe is purposeless seem to have a burning purpose themselves, which makes their theory of the lack of universal purposiveness quite unintelligible and inexplicable, for it makes them the exception to their own general rule.
One assumes such folks object to the "designer" because they know the only name for such a designer is God -- eternally unseen and thus eternally suspect in their view.
So what do they do? Among other things, they posit an infinity of completely unseen and unseeable things in refutation -- for instance, infinite inflation, or the multiple-universes theory. Even if these theories were true, there'd be no way for us to know it, let alone prove it; for such lie beyond our observational horizon (as far as we know). Thus a multiplicity of unseens is preferred to one Unseen.
Finally, our knowing or not knowing something depends on consciousness -- which is not a property of any machine any of us has ever encountered. To which "the other side" will reply: Well, we haven't seen a conscious machine -- YET. But just give science a little more time, and we'll show you one....
I would like to know in what way this expectation is in any way qualitatively different than the believer's faith in an afterlife.
FWIW. Thanks for a great thread, Alamo-Girl.