Well, we don’t actually have the fundamental laws of the universe yet.
We have laws that are relatively more fundamental than others, and my argument doesn’t require that the law be fundamental in an absolute sense. If scientists discovered that orphans are fireproof, and ran out of explanations for why the category “orphans” is part of the rule, they would essentially have proven it’s supernatural, even if, oh, they don’t rule out the possibility that both orphans and priests are fireproof.
Proving things to 100% certainty requires running out of explanations. Proving things to reasonable certainty only requires running out of reasonable explanations, and that’s certainly possible. And the latter is all that people mean when they speak of science proving something—science never proves anything to 100% certainty anyway.
We have the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. We have time and space twisting around in order to preserve the constancy of the speed of light. We have subatomic particles whose position is an approximation if their velocity is known.
The bar for ‘reasonable’ in scientific endeavours is ‘it led to a number of predictions and, when we did the experiments, the predictions turned out to be all correct’.
The disadvantage, from a scientific point of view, of the ‘it was all a miracle’ explanation is that it doesn’t lead to much in the way of useful predictions which can be checked. This makes experimental verification somewhat tricky. I don’t think a scientific theory can be considered reasonably certain without at least a little experimental verification (and simply repeating the observation that led to the development of the theory doesn’t count, because any theory that attempts to explain that observation will explain it).
We have laws that are relatively more fundamental than others, and my argument doesn’t require that the law be fundamental in an absolute sense. If scientists discovered that orphans are fireproof, and ran out of explanations for why the category “orphans” is part of the rule, they would essentially have proven it’s supernatural, even if, oh, they don’t rule out the possibility that both orphans and priests are fireproof.
Why would they run out of explanations? All that leads to is “we don’t know why yet, but we’ll think of something”.
And maybe trying to get funding for a bigger particle accelerator.
Proving things to 100% certainty requires running out of explanations. Proving things to reasonable certainty only requires running out of reasonable explanations, and that’s certainly possible. And the latter is all that people mean when they speak of science proving something—science never proves anything to 100% certainty anyway.
We have the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. We have time and space twisting around in order to preserve the constancy of the speed of light. We have subatomic particles whose position is an approximation if their velocity is known.
The bar for ‘reasonable’ in scientific endeavours is ‘it led to a number of predictions and, when we did the experiments, the predictions turned out to be all correct’.
The disadvantage, from a scientific point of view, of the ‘it was all a miracle’ explanation is that it doesn’t lead to much in the way of useful predictions which can be checked. This makes experimental verification somewhat tricky. I don’t think a scientific theory can be considered reasonably certain without at least a little experimental verification (and simply repeating the observation that led to the development of the theory doesn’t count, because any theory that attempts to explain that observation will explain it).