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Thank you so much for the analysis!

I wonder though if it is that science lacks the tools and methods to deal with the "X" or if scientists are more often determined not to deal with.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin according to The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism

I suggest that refusing to acknowledge the "X" can lead to kluged theories and error.

The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Alamo-Girl, this is probably the most aggravating "expert public pronouncement" that I have ever had to endure in my lifetime so far.

IMHO, invert it, and you get a better grasp on Reality. The statement would then go: "Once you 'kill God', then -- and only then -- can you believe in anything."

I gather God, you see, in Beck's view, could never be classified as "liberal." Therefore it follows -- O heaven forfend!!! -- if the Judeo-Christian God reigns, then man is constrained. And putative "liberals" and "progressives" and otherwise "enlightened" intelligentsia are "forbidden" to even "go there"....

Yet it seems to me -- as a contingent, finite creature who owes a lot to others -- that we human beings live within constraints.

So it wouldn't seem to be so much a matter of acknowledging this insight, as it would be a matter of figuring out how best for human beings to live "within the limits" of their collective natural and spiritual environment.

FWIW.