Take a rock for example: it could have formed naturally over millions of years or in a volcanic eruption and have been exposed to erosion or an intelligent designer who is able to manipulate matter on the atomic level created it. One can't even rule out the fact that our universe has been created last Tuesday by an omnipotent deity.
Such hypothesis can be neither confirmed nor completely ruled out and therefore they're not scientific.
Agreed, see my post at #46. We see eye to eye here.
But even if we discover Laws of Biology, as we have Laws of Physics and Chemistry, we will forever beg the question (scientifically, anyway) of how and why those laws came to be...
And the same was true for lightning up until some two hundred years ago. People begged the question of how and why lightnings happend. They invented deities like Thor or Zeus and numerous others who were thought to cause this phenomenon. Were they right? I don't know but today we have a naturalistic explanation for this phenomenon so we don't need these deities anymore.
Today it isn't lightning we're preoccupied with but more complex issues like the ones you named above. Of course we can ascribe them to some god but this "explanation" may be too discarded if a naturalistic explanation is available. Therefore I tend to say that I don't know rather than to assert that it must be the work of a deity. So there's absolutely no problem with saying that "science hasn't found out yet" but we can't state with absolute certainty that science will never answer a certain issue.
I think we can state with a fair amount of certainty that science will never be able to tell us what caused the Big Bang, or why the Laws governing the Universe are as they are, and not something else... For the precise reason that those questions require answers that go beyond space and time in their scope.
These are questions that science wasn't meant to answer, although each of us has the prerogative to utilize science to try and glean our best understanding of such matters.
The problem I see with supernaturalistic explanations is that one cannot determine whether there is no naturalistic explanation left so there is only the option to evoke the supernatural or whether there exists a naturalistic explanation but we haven't looked hard enough.
When it come to first causes, that is, "What causes nature?" the supernatural is a deus ex machina and "natural causes" is a tautology.
Neither has an advantage ofer the other, from the standpoint of science.
Please note, I'm not saying "Evolution is a tautology."