The problem, D-fendr, has been addressed in a humorous way by Stormer earlier, in post #221.
Can science "prove" that unicorns don't exist? Can science disprove Stormer's proclaimed belief concerning them? If it can't, then how can you, or anyone say that what Stormer 'believes' in is nonsense?
Besides, when you say that 'scientifically ... can only be correctly described using "random," that is the only explanation possible that science can assign,' what do you mean? My use of the word 'intent' was actually to show that there is no place for assigning 'intent' to the causes. How does intent even come into the explanation? I'd love to hear your explanation.
An interesting quote to consider:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"
- Unweaving The Rainbow.
On the point of chance and your mention of our observation of the Universe around us - what percentage would you assign to the completeness of our search for extra-terrestrial life? Additionally, to put a mental picture in the mind of how probability can be daunting, consider a person who purchases a lottery ticket on a given day, and later ends up winning the jackpot. For him to have won the prize, he'd have had to have chosen one set out of millions, if not billions, of possible winning number combinations. Now this is up to the level of the ticket alone. Step back a little, and observe the forces and events that lead to the man to have chosen the specific sequence of numbers - things that went on in his mind at the time he bought the ticket - things that could have occurred due to chance happening whose probabilities of occurrence are dauntingly minute. Step back even more, and the person would have had to have been at the right place, at the right time, to choose to buy a ticket. Go back further, and a specific sequence of events would have had to occur, for that person to have elected to invest his money in a lottery ticket. Go further back into those events, and you'll see how its order was affected by 'chance happenings' determined both by the actions of that person, and those of others who influenced him, thus clubbing probabilities of every one of them, to make the total probability seem improbable. This is not even considering the odds of the man's parents having met and mated to produce him, having met at a particular time, in a particular place, and lived in a particular way - and all these probabilities make the odds of him winning the lottery so incredibly rare - and yet, people win lotteries all the time!
Can science "prove" that unicorns don't exist?
MIsunderstands my point.
Intelligence, for example, exists. We're not trying to prove whether or not it exists. But whether it is a result of "randomness."
My point is that science cannot assign intent - it is by it's limits, blind to intent. It can say "nature abhors a vacuum" but that's not a purely scientific statement. It can say the universe does certain things but not that it intends to or was designed to.
This does NOT mean that the universe was designed - only that science by it's very good and solid limitations cannot say one way or the other.
Further, we cannot say that because science cannot speak to it, it therefore does not exist.
As to your second example: Yes, given enough tries, highly unlikely things occur statistically. (There are also clusters of highly-improbable occurances.)
I do not see how you can expand this to my point however. From our observances of the universe, where favorable conditions of matter exist, life occurs, where conditions for life are favorable, intelligence occurs, and the corollary for consciousness. This is what we observe.
To my major point again: Whether we see the latter emerging from the former, or whether we see the whole as a process favoring the latter is purely determined by our viewpoint.
The observable facts are the same; there is no scientific violation by either view. Yet viewpoint is not something subject to science.