Thank you for your reply!
then science would no longer be science - it'd be philosophy and/or theology and/or navel-lint contemplation.
Exactly my point, King! I suspect the far majority of scientists just want to do their work and have no motive to do politics, ideology, philosophy or theology under the color of science. But then there are the Pinkers, Singers, Dawkins and Lewontins who press the philosophy of naturalism beyond methods to metaphysics:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. 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 counter-intuitive, 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. - Lewontin On this forum - and among conservatives, the far majority to which I belong, believe that God exists, that His only begotten son - by whom and for Him everything was made - was enfleshed, died on a Cross and was resurrected on the third day and even now sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven - that all of this heaven and earth will be replaced by the new heaven and earth. We also mostly all believe He turned water into wine, made the blind see, healed the sick, raised the dead, was born of a virgin, walked on water and so on.
Considering all of these miracles which we believe, why we we doubt other miracles recorded in Scripture?
Moreover, in my case, since I have walked with the Lord for nearly 50 years now and know Him personally - why would I ever entertain a philosophy which denies His existence on "practical" grounds?