I'm curious to hear your opinion of this rebuttal, A_W. What's your take on it?
I think that Miller is first and foremost a good scientist, that he genuinely feels that faith can be accommodated, and that for political ends this can be effective.
The concepts of God which are made to be compatible with the latest scientific findings become so vague and nebulous that they become removed from traditional ideas about a creator God that steps into bronze age conflicts, knocks up virgins with miraculous children, and talks directly to certain men.
A good clarification was in here
I made no argument that this happy confluence of natural events and physical constants proves the existence of God in any way—only that it could be understood or interpreted as consistent with the Divine by a person of faith.
To Coyne, however, even the mere possibility that someone might understand nature in a Divine context is absolute heresy. As a result, while he strictly rules out anything but natural causes in the evolutionary process (as would I), he then must argue that the same process could never, ever happen again. Why? Because if conditions in our universe are such that they make the emergence of intelligent life, sooner or later, pretty much a sure thing, then people might wonder why. And if they were to come to the conclusion this might mean that there was a Creator who intended that as part of his work, they would be guilty of the very thoughts that Coyne finds so outrageous that he wishes to banish them from the scientific establishment.
This leap from a possible future observation that intelligent life is a cosmic inevitability, hard wired into the laws of physics, to a God hypothesis is an unscientific one.
I absolutely agree with the premise that within the universe natural law rules, I think that the idea of life being a universal occurrence is an open question (I remain agnostic on the subject, even if we found life on Mars it could just be our long lost cousins, we need independently originated life to make any firm judgements), but to make a leap (in future) and accept this as evidence of purpose and deliberate design of the universe is unjustified.
The jump from "intelligent life is a cosmic inevitability" to "this means there is a creator" is the point of divergence. It may be possible for a scientist to believe this (I know a few smart scientist who do) but without any evidence it is a weak hypothesis, a creative intelligence demands complexity, we get forced into that old infinite regression of who made God.
To declare a personal bias, I would personally like the universe to be eternal, if the universe is infinite there is no need for a beginning and no need for a creator, I don't have any trouble accepting the big bang model in spite of my personal preference.
Back to the topic, if numerous intelligent alien species were discovered (or discover us), and a robust model of how life originates can be defined, and it turns out that the universe is really well suited for life then the why question comes up; but this should be pursued in a scientific fashion, with a goal of producing some testable model, any appeal to an unfathomable and untestable designer only obstructs understanding (but if God showed up, sat down and produced a lot of persuasive proof for his existence and handiwork then I'd obviously have to change my mind).
It's that point where a religious scientist puts God into play that their scope may be narrowed.
I feel as if scientific naturalism naturally leads onto agnosticism about those huge questions of purpose with an active scepticism towards certain claims.
I would rather sit in a restless ignorance with half a dozen bitterly argued competing ideas swirling in my head than be satisfied with a God based non-answer.
