I take your point, which is a good one. Maybe The World should have drawn a distinction between our best explanations of the origin of new adaptations in existing organisms and our best explanations the origin of the first replicators, since the latter explanations are much more sketchy and more rickety.

Nevertheless, in the context of the controversy between evolution and creationism, the fact that one class of scientific explanations is more sketchy and rickety than another is not relevant. The issue there is not between a better and a worse explanation, but between explanation and non-explanation.

To forbid science to claim to have explained anything until we have a theory that we are sure will never be superseded, is holding it to an impossibly high standard, one that makes the above distinction impossible to state in words. Nevertheless it is a real distinction, crucial to all progress in understanding anything.

Science was right to claim that Newton had explained, with his theories of gravity and motion, why the planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus. It explained it, and it explained it with good, independently-testable, scientific theories, while the theory that God had ordained ellipses because their shape pleased him would have been a non-explanation.

The fact that Newton's explanation was later superseded by one that denied the existence of gravitational forces is not relevant. Nor is the fact that neither Newton's nor any other scientific theory is an ultimate explanation (for instance, Newton did not explain why the gravitational force obeyed an inverse square law rather than some other formula). And furthermore, though it was false, Newton's theory contained a great deal of truth that survived into Einstein's theory. It could not have been as successful as it was in its predictions if that had not been so. The divine-fiat theory, on the other hand, is always equally 'successful' no matter what is to be explained, and hence it is always equally empty.

Similarly, evolution theory today, with its replicators and genes and mutations and selections and genotypes and phenotypes, has explained the origin of life. The fact that a number of possibilities are still open for the actual sequence of chemical events, does not change the fact that when Darwin proposed his first, flawed, version of the theory, something fundamentally changed: what had previously been a mystery of ‘how could that possibly be?’, had become a mystery of ‘what, specifically, happened’. The latter is an open-ended mystery. There will never be an ultimate explanation. Even if we had a video of the formation of the original ancestor-replicator out of non-replicating components, there would still be the mystery of why the laws of physics were such as to permit things like that to happen.

There will always be great mysteries, big gaps, and also serious mistakes, and we shall always be ignorant of what lies beyond, or beneath, or in the gaps between, our knowledge. That does not change the fact that we already have genuine explanations that contain an enormous amount of truth, and that there is a significant distinction between modes of thought that seek and discover and criticise and improve these explanations, and modes that seek only to bolster a fixed non-explanation.