Eugenie Scott is great when it comes to dealing with anti-evolution people, especially those who imagine that evolution is some kind of faith (as in religious belief) rather than a scientific theory backed by centuries of empirical evidence.

Modern science — meaning science since roughly Galileo’s time — looks for material causes of material phenomena. The supernatural need not apply, so gods, ghosts, demons, etc., are right out as explanations for what we see or experience. Likewise, materialism seeks to find material causes for so-called supernatural events, such as miracles (weeping statues), ghosts and apparitions, magic tricks, and so on.

When he derived the equation for universal gravitational, Newton had no explanation for how the Moon, for example, “knows” the Earth is nearby and should exert a force on it. In other words, he couldn’t explain how gravity gets around. So, he was honest and said something to the effect, “I don’t know how gravity gets around, but I know it does, and anyway, look, my equation works!” His critics accused him of invoking witchcraft with this action-at-a-distance mumbo-jumbo, but since his equation worked, eventually they shut up about it.

Einstein said gravity “gets around” by warping spacetime. And the Standard Model presumes there is a particle (graviton) — as yet undetected — that carries the force. These are material explanations for gravitation, because we can measure them or detect them.

God is for some people a construct of human imagination and for others an invisible supernatural being. Either way, He/She/It is not part of the material world (unlike Madonna) and exists separate from the world of science. If science were a metal detector, God is a wooden statue under the sand. The metal detector can’t find wooden objects, and the wooden object can’t influence the metal detector.