An important perceptual difference between Tracy Walters and Dr. Patterson appears to lie in the relationship, if any, between science and the supernatural. Accordingly, I offer the following remarks as context for the particular points discussed below.
Natural science is an enterprise committed to discovering physical truth.
It functions under a feedback cycle that gathers reproducable data, creates falsifiable hypotheses, and makes logical predications that direct the gathering of future data. The latter is used to retain, alter or replace the hypotheses. An hypothesis is retained when it answers every question we can think to ask of it, and discarded when it can no longer be altered to make its predictions fit the data. But, of course, we are also free to view the matter as originating from a natural cause yet to be discovered. This seems to be Dr. Patterson's view.