In an article on the origin of life (OOL) in Scientific American physicist Paul Davies says this:
In 1995 renowned Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve called life "a cosmic imperative" and declared "it is almost bound to arise" on any Earth-like planet. De Duve's statement reinforced the belief among astrobiologists that the universe is teeming with life. Dubbed biological determinism by Robert Shapiro of New York University, this theory is sometimes expressed by saying that "life is written into the laws of nature."
In other words the laws of nature are such as to make the origin of life an inevitability, notwithstanding that no one at present has any idea how it happened or could have happened. Even so, De Duve and others say, it had to have happened through purely material processes and forces because the laws of nature dictated it. And how do we know they dictated it? Because it happened.
So, when materialism can't explain the exquisite fine-tuning of the cosmos materialists posit a multitude of other universes that are empirically undetectable in order to increase the probability that one like ours would arise by chance.
When materialism can't explain consciousness materialists simply deny that such a thing exists.
Now, because they can't explain how life might have evolved by purely mechanistic processes they posit the existence of laws that have never been detected that make the appearance of life a matter of course.
This is great sport, but it causes us to wonder where it will end. Will someone someday rub his chin and say, "Hmm, maybe the simplest explanation for all these phenomena is not an infinite number of worlds, or inscrutable laws of nature, or the denial of a consciousness that we're all conscious of having? Maybe the simplest explanation is that there's an intelligence out there somewhere behind all these phenomena which are so hard to explain in terms of materialism."
Such a possibility is certainly no less speculative than mumbo jumbo about other universes and mysterious, unknown laws of physics. It would also be, in its way, a Grand Unifying Theory of dozens of otherwise hard to explain phenomena.
RLC
