hurrah!
Well, for some odd reason, it makes more sense to believe that science has a better chance of proving something than a unsubstantiated belief.
Is it not logical to rely on something that has proven itself repeatedly, rather than something that cannot prove itself once, to explain these gaps?
I don't believe science is always correct about everything, nor do I believe science can discover/uncover everything.
What I do believe, however, is that in comparison to "God did it", science wins every time.
While we're talking about science and philosophy, may I direct you to the Scientific Method?
It is the single most reliable way we have of verifying the validity of something.
I'm going to answer these all in one go, so bear with me. There is no "one" scientific method. Science itself had to be invented and it had to change. What we now call 'science' in an invention of the early 20th century. People have a very different conception of science in the 18th and 19th centuries because it was much more philosophical. The institutionalisation of science means that a certain concept of the scientific method has become established and is not questioned. As I'm a materialist, I'm obviously using a much older conception of science thats still working with philosophy and I'm keeping in mind that Soviet Science used philosophical challanges against the big bang, qauntum mechanics and (most notoriously) genetics. The reason these are rejected is because it is
assumed that science is neutral on political and religious questions because it
cannot answer these questions. Western science remains attached to the philosophical dualism of Descartes ("I think therefore I am") in which thought takes precedence over reality; philosophically, we therefore struggle with questions whenever consciousness becomes involved because we believe consciousness does not have an objective properties that can be studied. Whether this is in psychology or nueoroscience, we are stumbling over philosophical questions about
what is possible to know via the scientific method. Most of the same problems come up in relation to religion which treats consciousness as something that is independent of the brain and can therefore exist as god or the soul. As A materialist I could argue that consciousness is a natural phenemenoa and so can be studied using science and this opens up whole new areas to scientific study. Soviet science is dissmissed as 'scientism' by treating science as an ideology which can explain
all pheneomena. The inverse of course is that "our" western science is the "true" science;
but how can we know this?
The problem of demarcating what is science and what is pseudo-science is not wholly objective, but is a product of human reasoning with an incomplete knowledge of reality. Our assumptions about what is real gives us
expectations of what we will find as scientific knowledge grows, but if that doesn't prove to be the case- the very concept and definition of the scientific method will have to change as it aquires new knowledge about what is real. The Scientific method is not a constant. it itself changes and therefore can and should be debated.