I'll tell you something, from all these years that I've been an academic, I've found that there is this misconception that the scientific method and science in general is infalible, it is not, it only serves as a way to prove a certain theory or explain something, it doesn't mean that it is the truth or that its infalible or even that it is universal, let me give you an example, the scientific method proved Newton's law of gravity, it proved it, years later it turned out that Newton's law of gravity wasn't entirely correct, it was a special case of Einstein's theory of general relativity, does that mean that Newton's law is not useful? no, Newton's law of gravity is what took the first rocket to the moon, but in the bigger picture there is a bigger truth and that is Einstein's theory of relativity.
There is this famous paper by lord Kelvin in the 1800's which was titled something like "The dark clouds of physics", in it, Kelvin argued that the human race had already figured out in its entirety how physics work, we had Netwon's laws, Maxwell Equations, the laws of thermodynamics, etc... with the exception of 2 things, which he calls the 2 dark clouds of physics, he mentions something like once these 2 dark clouds are resolved, everything would be known. The 2 dark clouds were the following: The ultraviolet catastrophe and the Michelson Moorley experiment.
First, the Ultraviolet catastrophe was solved by Max Planck and it gave birth to quantum mechanics, the Michelson Moorley experiment was explained by Einstein's laws of relativity, and both these things opened Pandora's box, not only did we realize that these were not small issues, but that all that we have known until then was wrong or at least needed revision to take into account quantum and relativistic effects. So the 2 clouds of physics literally turned into the 1 billion clouds of physics.
If you read Max Planck's biography, it is mentioned that when he talked to his PhD thesis advisor, Planck said to him that he wanted to become a theoretical physicist, and his advisor discouraged Planck by saying that the field was literally dead because there wasn't much that needed to be discovered, he adviced Planck to go into experimental physics instead but Planck refused, I bet that his advisor bit his own tongue afterwards.
Until recently it was a fact that there are 4 fundamental forces in nature: Gravity, electromagnetic force, the strong force and the weak force, everything can be explained in terms of those 4 forces, well, what do you know, it appears (I read this very recently) that in 2019 and recently updated, CERN might have discovered another 5th force.
https://physicsworld.com/a/more-evidence-for-a-fifth-force-found-in-radioactive-decay-measurements/
Back again to Einsteins theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, the two of them are not in perfect agreement, for years, scientists have tried to find a unifying theory between Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics with no luck, many theories have been proposed, but some are so abstract that it is practially impossible to prove them with experiments using the scientific method, at least not humanly possible in the present and near future. Some scientists believe there will never be a Unifiying theory.
At the beginning, scientist thought that science was a way to explain God's creation (this was Newton, Galileo, Maxwell, etc.. belief), but over years it turned into this idea that Science is the absolute truth for everything and actually used to disprove God, however Science has been proven to be wrong so many times that you can't say it is the absolute truth. A big break ocured when the world was thought as deterministic (this was in fact Newton's and Einsteins Idea), A causes B which causes C, and when quantum mechanics was discovered it turned out to be probabilistic instead (Einstein disliked this idea and spoke out with his famous quote "God does not play dice with the world"), however, I've heard interviews from Nobel physics prize winners who think there will be a return to a deterministic point of view sometime in the future. My point is that Science is not the absolute truth, weather scientists can't predict with 100% acuracy what will be the weather be next week, let alone 50 years from now, hell, they couldn't even predict that Trump was going to win when everything pointed out that Hillary was the winner.
Science and mathematics are MODELS, they are human ways of explaining the world, that is what I've found over years of learning physics, math and engineering. Some things we use in mathematics are not even real, for example the concept of infinity, infinity is not even a number, its a concept, it wasn't until Georg Cantor formally proposed what infinity is, and in fact he proved some crazy things like there are bigger infinities than others, for example the infinite set of real numbers is bigger than the inifinite set of rational or natural numbers. We tend to think of infinity as something very large, that is not what infinity is, the most common explanation is that its something that is unbounded. However, in the physical world, nothing is unbounded, not even the universe, some physicist argue about how the universe may be infinite but it hasn't been proven, also if the universe had a begining and its expanding, then it can't be infinite.
Calculus is based on the opposite, on something infinitely small called infinitesimal, the first theorists didn't like this idea, and instad tried to justify it with something called like "exhaustion", which means that if you make things smaller than a certain level, it esscentially becaomes "exahusted" and you can consider it infinistesimal, but that is not how Calculus works!, yet if you look at nature, there is not such thing as infinitesimal, there are fundamental particles, nothing can be less than those, there is the elemental charge which is 1.602X10^-19C, no charge can be smaller than that in isolation, unless you consider quarks. So we can agree that there is nothing either inifinitesimal or infinite. The only thing that is essentially the definition of infinity is God.
I've always been a catholic, but the more I have learned about math, science and engineering, the more religious I have become among other things, I think its the ability to realize that science is not truth but it certainly looks very similar to the truth. I certainly doubt very much about science all the time, its not like I think that the world is 5000 years old, but to be so narrow minded and believe that science can explain everything, is to me, simply not true and very arrogant from our perspective.
Even the theory of evolution which some people today think of it as the Law of evolution rather than the Theory of evolution might not be entirely true, David Berlinski and many others have very solid arguments to disprove it, they mention that the theory does explain things like how some species in some areas adapt physically to their enviroment but it fails to prove the general, broader picture. There is something called the Wallace problem which evolutionary scientists haven't been able to disprove, Wallace was a contemporary of Darwin, and basically argued something of the like (I am quoting Berlinski on Wallace): Suppose you take an isolated tribe from the Amazon, you take a 6 month old baby from a family of hunters of that tribe and you take the baby to the UK and you give the baby an English education, after some years, the baby, now a man will be indistiguishable from all other graduates of say Oxford, he will be able to speak english, do math, literature, dance, every other thing that any other human being could, but why? if he was part of the Amazon and he was part of a hunter tribe, why can he exihibit traits that are not relevant to his enviroment? why does he has these other 'hidden' traits that all human beings seem to have? afterall, knowing math is not relevant to his survival or relevant to becoming a hunter in the Amazon. There is also the fact that we are the only type of creature in the world, there is no other like us, to attribute that to only chance and adaptation is highly unlikely, Now, I am not saying I do not believe on Darwin's theory, but I want to emphasize it is just that, a Theory.
I wouldn't be surprised that the theory of evolution and many other things that we take for granted now are disproven or replaced by a better theory in the future.
I agree with Jordan Peterson (and Dyson also speaks of this) when he says that climate models are so unpredictable from the start and that they have so much error that when you project into the future 50 years from now, the uncertainty is extremely high, so how can you take actions to prevent climate change if you can't even measure or project with certainty what the results will be of taking such actions?
A common story regards what Bob Pease thought (hated actually) about spice, he said that spice lies, even if its based on all the physics theory, some argue that it is the lack of better models, etc... but the point is that what math and science predicts is sometimes very different from reality, there is this famous picture of Pease throwing a computer from the roof of National Semiconductor claiming "This computer won't lie to me again"
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