> identify how chemical reactions possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction They’re not, but some scientific terms might help demystify the actual

> identify how chemical reactions possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction They’re not, but some scientific terms might help demystify the actual point being made— 1. Emergence means that higher levels of matter can have behaviors that are not determinable from its constituents (e.g. chemistry). 2. In cybernetics, Downward Causation means that the constituents’ behaviors can actually be influenced by behaviors at higher levels. I’m not a physicist so I’m not sure how much of the “quantum” weirdness can be isolated to its domain, but complex systems appear to be mysterious across the entire hierarchy. > They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs... beliefs aren’t knowledge and they aren’t science Science is an instrument for verifying beliefs about very specific things though. My favorite definition of science is that it is a system for drawing out the patterns (regularities) of nature that are the same across space and time. It can only focus on “common denominators” of reality (not the whole of it) in order to reduce it to the parts which can be predicted (material prophecy). But it’s not an instrument that you can use to verify beliefs about segments of reality that it’s designed to ignore. Like it can’t deal with its own foundational question (i.e. “can we truly deduce the unseen by only what is seen?”), and surely Truth is larger than we can know by any single tool for ascertaining it.