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.
A very good point (in a post full of many good points!). Materialist theories tend to deny the concept of quality and insist that everything can be defined in terms of quantity. Darwin sought to make man a little better in quantity than apes for example. While quality cannot be measured with a ruler, we certainly do perceive it. Don Quixote is a book of higher quality than Hunt for Red October, the Mona Lisa is a picture of higher quality than a VanGogh. We can see differences in quality and appreciate them in many things even though they cannot be measured and sometimes they cannot even be explained. For this reason alone I must agree with you that theories which seek to explain all in a mathematical way are only dealing with a part, not the whole of what life is about and thus cannot in any way be 'true' in the context of explaining the whole of life.
The debate may stall over these views. (It's usually irretrievable in the form of "my view plus the select few who "get it" and all the others".) Science at most levels doesn't concern itself with these views because it is performed at a very specific or local level. Constant claims of world-views and skewing of interpretation of scientific data notwithstanding, research is not concerned with metaphysical world views. That is, the questions in science are not of the kind whether there's a God or greater meaning to all of this. In fact, most of the questions in research are not about the large theories but about very specific local questions. The interpretation of results at that level is rarely dependent on big theories and even less so on world-views. For instance, a typical question in biology concerns protein function. The design and interpretation of the study is independent of world view.
Research is not even overwhelmingly theory driven, but, among others, a combination of method, instrumentation, and theory.
The impact of world-view on science is most profound at the funding level.