I'm starting to think that Paddoboy isn't interested in "abiogenesis" so much as he is in trying to make a metaphysical claim in the guise of science, slipping something in at the beginning as an assumption, then triumphantly pulling it out at the end as the conclusion. Here's how I think it works in his Wikipedia quote and why I think that he thinks that it supports him even when (as JamesR points out) it doesn't.
So I think that for Paddoboy, the value of "abiogenesis" is that it's a way to sneak in the word "
natural" as a purported item of knowledge with all of the authority that he believes science possesses.
That's why I think that he repeats over and over that "abiogenesis is the only scientific process" and ignores the objection that if science doesn't know how life originated and only has a whole lot of not-always-consistent hypotheses about small parts of it, the scientific picture can't truthfully be called a process at all. Certainly not a known process. So if it's an unknown process that still remains to be discovered, what kind of qualities can we confidently say that the process has? What does attaching the word "scientific" add to our understanding?
I don't know who wrote this Wikipedia article or who edited it subsequently, but I'd guess that the word 'natural' was inserted in there to indicate science's
methodological naturalism, in effect to say that if an answer isn't a natural answer, it wouldn't be a scientific account of life's origins. Religious creationism wouldn't qualify as 'abiogenesis' in this sense even if it does purport to give an account of life's origins, since its proposed answer to how life originated isn't a naturalistic answer.
Of course that doesn't exclude the possibility that life might have had a supernatural origin. It's just saying that if it did, that supernatural origin would be outside the scope of science and wouldn't qualify as a scientific account of life's origins (as abiogenesis in this sense).
But Paddoboy wants more than that rather uncontroversial observation. He seems to me to be implicitly claiming that science somehow guarantees that
the origin of life can only have been a natural process. Hence science falsifies any other possibility.
So the question that anyone who thinks this way needs to answer is how anyone can be so sure that any unknown that's still to be described and explained, such as the origin of life in this case, really was a natural process and falls within the scope of science. It's a working assumption in how science proceeds, an assumption that's served science very well so far, but it isn't something that people actually know.
Metaphysical naturalism, the conviction that the scope of science is coextensive with reality itself and that nothing can exist that falls outside the scope of science,
is an article of faith and would seem to be unknowable in principle.
Introducing implicit metaphysical naturalism seems to me to be the agenda in these kind of arguments. But the question remains: how does observing that a proposed account is unscientific exclude it as a possibility?
Thank you.
