Intelligence can be used to construct clever, convoluted defenses of non-scientific concepts.

You can read that as implying that everything can potentially be explained using scientific concepts. I don't, of course, mean we could do so today; I mean the assumption that it is inherently possible. But that seems to me roughly equivalent to the belief [and I use the word with trepidation!] that everything could be understood through the laws of mechanics as a 'clockwork universe', a view that the whole of science pretty much accepted before the discovery of radioactivity started us down the path of things being rather more complicated than that.

On this question I am agnostic: I do not know whether science is potentially capable of explaining everything or not. But on balance, despite sciences tremendous powers of explanation, I suspect not. None of which should lead us to assume a book written so long ago can do so.

Now, I think it entirely proper to use our intelligence to construct models, explanations and interpretations of things that are either currently or perhaps eternally beyond science. Philosophy, for example, is a good discipline for working with uncertainties of that type. Bill is however completely right in declaring we should not be using our intelligence to assert such models as correct in the light of evidence which demonstrates they cannot be valid.