It's about continually striving to learn more and more about how things work. Possibly the end goal is to know how everything works, but I seriously doubt that is feasible. You may say that the biggest leaps in science were taken when people made extraordinary claims or theories which were ignored and ridiculed at first before becoming widely accepted . Scientists are undoubtedly coming up with really wild theories about how life originated on our planet, and most will be discarded with further observation and testing. We'll never discard it, but we'll keep searching until we find a solution that fits in with our system of natural laws.
Patience is a necessity.
I use cold hard reason to weigh the alternatives and choose the simplest explanation of things. That's a good method. However, one common problem there is that people often choose the simplest method after discarding the supernatural as a possibility. If you can't solve a problem, you wait for more methods and wisdom to come along. It make take a very long time, but you don't give up and say that the supernatural explanation is plausible.