Quanta Magazine and Systematic Bias

A similar post was initially posted on the blog Uncommon Descent.

About an article in Quanta Magazine.  I definitely appreciate this article, but it is an example of qualms I have about the methodology of materialist researchers.

As things stand, the known elementary particles, codified in a 40-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, have spent decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern. But time and again, ever-more-powerful particle colliders have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of new particles and phenomena, increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead.

Ignoring the interesting point that we have this science magazine candidly admitting that the evidence tends toward the death of naturalism, I have a serious concern about the methodology that is just flatly unchallenged among these researchers.     

Rather than following the evidence where it leads, they've been trying to make science fit their particular conclusions (i.e. "naturalness") rather than letting the evidence speak for itself.

Fine-tuning simply cannot be accepted as a conclusion, so these researchers must look for "clever ways" to make nature fit the pattern they want.  

  The methods these researchers are using are not scientific.  This is however apparently unchallenged in the scientific community since it is so proudly and prominently displayed here.  It may be because the systematic bias runs deep against anything remotely theistic.  There is however a paradigm shift underway.