Except it is not limited to the realm of the measurable. A great counter example is the entire effort to delimit what genetics can and cannot tell us. We have to understand and study genealogy, even thought it is not in the realm of measurable (in the distant past). So science is studying and making statements about something that is not measurable, and that is how we give better understanding of its limits.
That seems about right.
That we will cover in another thread, on reproductively compatible aliens: A Science Fiction Riddle.
If that was the case, we would be deciding between 2 possibilities in science:
- Independent evolutionary origin on earth.
- Independent evolutionary origin from another planet.
Christians, out side of science, could legitimately wonder about a third hypothesis:
- A special creation event, or independent abiogenesis that gives rise to them.
The thing is, we can never full confidence in #3, without completely ruling out #1 and #2, and I do not know how to do that. The more people work to establish #1 and #2, the more confidence we’d have in #3, so it is best to just leave science to do its thing, without allowing recourse to #3 in science, even if we take that position outside of science.
There is some subtly here that I hope you are seeing. Every event is simultaneously (1) regular and (2) unique. It all depends how you look at it. One of the tricks of scientific progress is reframing a problem to see regularities that were previously hidden. Science rewards us for looking at the world in a way that uncovers the regularities, but that does not deny the uniqueness of every event. So we have to be a bit careful here about how we work this out.