Teaching students to assess the credibility of claims.

 Teach them to think?

Wise owl teachers used to suggest that the fundamental purpose of schooling is to teach young people to think.  For some reason, that priority never quite made it to the curriculum, at least, not in any classroom I was seated in.  Previously I have praised the National Curriculum for bringing a step change in the quality of the educational experience, an opinion I strongly maintain, as it specifies core areas of knowledge and understanding and also attempts a balance between knowledge content and skills acquisition, in Science and other subjects.  The first (1990) NC for Science had seventeen attainment targets, the first of which was specifically about the nature and processes of Science. ('Exploration of Science' was its title.) The perhaps inevitable slimming down that followed unfortunately led to not only the distillation of 17 attainment targets into a more manageable programme that respected workload concerns, but also a severe pruning of AT1.  The ambitions that had been nurtured in the design of the Science Curriculum were not preserved in the modified version.  In particular, the directions to show students how science skills could be demonstrated in connection with historical developments in science, such as our developing understanding of the nature of the solar system, were removed.   Such narratives and investigations could perhaps have been reintegrated into other sections of the repackaged curriculum, but textbook writers and exam specification authors generally did not value this priority.  I rather wonder how many of them realised how important it was.

In more recent years, the DFE under ministers such as Michael Gove directed a particular refocusing of the delivery of the National Curriculum which had implications for the way the balance of skills and knowledge would be addressed.  The EBacc (English Baccalaureate) statistical performance measure became a hoop through which schools, and therefore students, would be forced to jump. Slimming down administration and cost cutting became excuses to remove coursework, and therefore, skills development, from the curriculum.  This need not be the case, it could be objected, but this would be naïve.  If it isn't going to be examined, then schools won't teach it.  The 'National Curriculum' is not the sole basis for shaping the educational journeys that students might undertake.  The nature of the final examination syllabus and the assessment regime in which that journey is completed are also key shapers of the wider unwritten curriculum that students experience.

Less admin, more teaching.  Quite so.  Focus finances on teachers and the classroom and laboratory experience.  Absolutely.  Avoid burdening 15-16 year old students with punishing exam and coursework schedules.  Well indeed.  But the management of time, money and bureaucracy are not educationally neutral activities.  Are we now better positioned to teach Science and grow new scientists, as well as a generation of students who understand what Science is and its ongoing contribution to society?  

Many of us are not convinced that we are.  We fear that we have rather gone full circle, and post-Gove's reforms, are back in a distinctly Dickensian situation.  In the opening lines of 'Hard Times' (Charles Dickens, 1854) the teacher's manager put it like this:

Critical Thinking 

A few years into my career there was a small victory for those wise owl teachers I reminisced about.  A one year AS level course (half an A level) was developed that proved popular with sixth forms who wanted to broaden their students' experience without adding to the content burden they faced.  It was a requirement in my school for students taking two A levels, and an option for those following three- typical flexibilities in the non-National Curriculum years after GCSE.  The course taught students the formal nature of an argument, being the making of a claim with some evidence.  Through a sequence of case studies, in which class discussion was the default activity, we would attempt to get better at thinking.  Some studies would look at topics that are easy to critique, such as recent product advertising media, while others would engage more challenging topics such as Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda from the late 1930s.  Note that the inception of this course predated the common use of the internet by students.  The only 'content' required in this curriculum were the criteria for evaluating sources of information and the claims based on them, so-called credibility criteria which might be summed up in mnemonics such as RAVEN or CRAVEN, viz

At times it could be challenging to keep students' minds focused (is it ever thus?!) on the skills being developed rather than the content that was in question at any time, since it would only ever be skills rather than content that would determine their examination outcome.  But this rather begs a question.  Is good thinking, so-called critical thinking, only about the process of thinking, or does it matter what is being thought about?  I will come to this below.  But the point in question in the AS course was about the evaluation of sources of so-called evidence, and the basis on which claims are being made.  This is a reasonable enough aim, and further resources have been developed to assist students at all levels post GCSE.  Here is another mnemonic which brings a different focus to the criteria that could be used to evaluate discrete sources of information.  'CARS' is more tailored to the pitfalls of the internet age, where students can so easily be caught out by web sources of dubious academic reputation (if any!).

The cartoon below is a modified version of one that used to amuse my students tremendously- you can see that there is now a computer featured, which did not appear in the original.  As I write, Putin's war against Ukraine is passing into its seventh month; this cartoon offers a deeply cutting analysis of the 'sources' emerging from both sides.

Thinking skills at 11-16

Should we be teaching all students to think about these, or other things? Surely these skills do belong in the KS3 and 4 curriculum, not just as an option for post-GCSE students following an academic learning route? The cautious might reply that we ought not overburden the younger and less able students whose requirement for a basic set of GCSE results is a higher priority.  This debate is ongoing, but I will observe here that some younger students are being introduced to critical thinking skills and familiarity with credibility criteria under the heading of 'Gifted and Talented', or 'Higher Ability Pupils' as they are latterly described.  Schools are developing bespoke in-house extra-curricular programmes to assist those so identified (and it is entirely up to each school how they do that) to reach their full potential.  In principle it is recognised that students who do well in the standard curriculum don't need or appreciate more of the same, but rather something different.  So I find myself delivering a speed course to a few 13 year olds on credibility criteria and critical thinking skills.  For some reason, they are much amused by this alternative mnemonic, which I've given out at the end of the course as a plenary.

Teaching about the credibility of claims in Science and Religion studies

If you are a teacher or student who is unfamiliar with the resources I have referred to above, then I hope that you will be much helped by this discovery.  There is a reference to a full slide deck below on Critical Thinking that will repay further study. Whether offered as a discrete section of the curriculum at any key stage or not, your teaching and learning will certainly benefit from the strategic perspectives deployment of these perspectives, not least at a time when 'fake news' is a phrase that has entered students' everyday vocabulary.  However, this is all preamble to my intentions in this blogpost.  As I hinted above, there is a bigger question at issue.  

The first drafts for Critical Thinking adopted the mnemonic RAVEN, but many took to adding a 'C' for Context (or Circumstantial matters).  What may be considered a reasonable and uncontroversial claim in one context is not (necessarily) in another context.  Meeting the other RAVEN criteria then becomes insufficient.  

The 'C' in CARS stands for credibility, which chiefly refers to the academic credentials of the author(s) in question, and this is an important point to emphasise with students.  But this higher level language (tier 3?) perhaps hides that credibility is fundamentally about whether a particular claim, and the person making it, are believable.  We are being asked to show faith in the overall claims of the author, based on their training and expertise, speaking as we hope they are on behalf of their wider academic community.  'Facts' are only presented as factual in that field because there is general agreement that such-and-such things are indeed the case, as best as they can tell. 

So this also overlaps with the 'A' in CRAVEN; whether the so-called experts, with their prior training and qualifications, are indeed able to see/perceive as would be required to give a valid basis to their claims to adjudicate that certain things are facts.

In CARS, the 'R' is for reasonableness, which is to say, is there discernible bias, or unprofessional motivation, or an important flaw in the consideration of alternate possibilities?  It is one thing to examine these matters as they apply within a specific subject area, but quite another when the question is interdisciplinary in nature.

The 'P' for purpose in CRAAP is helpful in this regard.  This heading helps us to grapple with the reality that information/ knowledge, or claimed facts, are not necessarily to be considered objective statements that simply exist.  They must have a foundation, and this can be very secure for certain purposes (and so treated as factual), but if deployed for other purposes, then this does not apply. 

All this is not to argue for some post-modern denial of any kind of objective truth or our ability to know about the world with reliable accuracy, but rather to argue for the necessity for some appreciation of philosophy, especially our philosophy of how we know anything, which is called epistemology.  We are thus faced simultaneously with three challenges if we are to apply all this to interdisciplinary questions in science and religion studies.

1.  What is religious knowledge? ( I felt like putting that first...)

2. What is scientific knowledge?  (Does it even matter what order they go in?)

3. How could we relate 1 and 2 together?  (and what about others...  ?)

I visited the Natural History Museum in South Kensington recently, and noticed some folk wearing T-shirts adorned with the Neil deGrasse Tyson quote above.  It's a good basis to start from, given the enthusiasm for anti-scientific conspiracy theories and COVID denialism that is going around at the moment.  I hope to teach my students to place a great deal of trust / faith/ credulity in the claims of Science to show us what the world is like and how we can interact with it appropriately.  

But if the purpose behind the pronouncements of a scientist is to wield the valid findings of science as knock-down evidence in a boundary question, or across the border of boundary questions in another discipline where the rules of science cannot apply, then they lose credibility as a reliable and qualified speaker, no longer being an expert, and now only giving an opinion.

It is regrettable that the extensive scientific training most scientists and science teachers have received lacks the philosophical insights that would safeguard them all from making simplistic and invalid generalisations about the powers of Science, without regard for its limitations, as though admitting such limits would undermine Science in any material way.  Perhaps it suits those with atheistic and humanistic commitments to have it so.

It is regrettable that too many with proper and respectable commitments to theism in one form or another (but certainly including a significant number of so-called evangelical Christians) lack the philosophical insights that would safeguard them from making simplistic and invalid critiques of Science, suggesting, for example, that the nature of Science being such that it holds even its strongest theories in an open hand, constantly open to review and modification as and when new evidence comes to light, therefore stands as a fundamental flaw to the whole discipline, undermining the whole of Science. 'You admit that you are never totally sure- so you have nothing certain to say!'  Perhaps it has suited them to have it so.

What we lack in our society is a general appreciation of what Science and those who are engaged in it are really able to see and perceive. (Elsewhere I have commented on the phenomena which show that the cosmos is both regular and very surprising) An education that facilitated this outcome would ground a proper appreciation of what scientists can properly claim to be facts, both by scientists and the public at large. If such activities were a universal feature of the religious education of all our students, not merely those who opt for a sufficiently advanced qualification as at present, then future generations can be enabled to respect the particular assumptions of believers and non-believers of various sorts, and evaluating which sorts of claims can be considered truth claims because there is some sort of validated evidence to back them up, and which are not, though can perhaps be respected for other reasons.  It is proper that we should be teaching students to understand what the purpose is behind all the subject disciplines, therefore giving them a sense of the extent to which balance and the consideration of alternative perspectives is valid, and indeed, vital.  Let's be clear, as I give some guidance on (3) above: we should all be affirming that Science is a powerful way of knowing about the cosmos and it offers us much knowledge that we should rightly consider in the category of facts, even if certain matters are subject to revision.  Yet there is a great deal that we now know we do not know, and this does indeed include matters on which various people hold what we can respectfully categorise as religious views.  Faith of a rather more active sort applies to them, and Science might offer assistance in sorting between those that are more or less reasonable.  However, since Science itself now shows us that the cosmos is less predictable and more surprising than was predicted/ expected one hundred or so years ago, Science certainly has no authority to adjudicate on which (religious) beliefs are more or less likely to be true by itself.  We may find other grounds for that. {But we might not, which is what is meant by the 'theory laden-ness of facts'} If there is to be better thinking in the future, of a critical and rigorous kind that assesses claims against credibility criteria, then this will be informed by all the subject disciplines, not solely by science.  Might Charles Dickens still say that we will likely need to engage in more philosophical exercises with teachers and students, and especially those who direct them? 

Notes, links and references

http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/hardtimes/2/

My claim is that there has been untoward interference in the reshaping of the curriculum by a number of non-educational agents, including government ministers, especially Michael Gove.  Others would go further to accuse many before him of also engaging in an overtly 'P'olitical project under the guise of constructing a general curriculum. For example: oai:eprints.ucl.ac.uk.OAI2:10021590  The National Curriculum: the natural evolutionary product of two decades of debate and development? Or a device for keeping the world Tory?  Patrick Trevor Willan  1 January 1995 Institute of Education, University of London.  Perhaps this all goes to show the peril involved in discussions of God, sex and politics- especially all three at once.

https://slideplayer.com/slide/243756/  Unit 501 'Critical Thinking'

https://lewisuwritingcenter.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/cars-checklist-for-evaluating-sources1.pdf

https://twitter.com/BlissfulBunbun/status/1474833698453278721/photo/1 ALSO at https://9gag.com/gag/abGgQ1B 

Similar CC4 source at https://libguides.cwc.edu/bias AND https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/54677-media-bias-handout/view MODIFYING THE ORIGINAL AT https://library.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/craap-test.pdf  OR https://www.facebook.com/UWStoutLibrary/photos/a.10150674191761280/10158515308611280/?type=3 

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1381197292728942595

https://www.rit.edu/cla/philosophy/quine/theory_ladenness.html

Breaking the laws of Science?

 

  Stained Glass window design: "Science" in the lobby of Novosibirsk State University, 3400km East of Moscow.

A commonplace objection to the possibility of a constructive relationship between Science and Religion goes something like this.

Science deals with facts.  

Religion may be said to have its facts, but these 'facts' are of a different nature to the facts of Science. 

Science collects data from extensive experiments, that is, the data is empirically obtained, in an objective, impersonal, dispassionate manner.  Such experiments, investigating testable hypotheses about the natural world, will yield repeatable results.  And, importantly, it will not matter who does the experimenting and data gathering.  Anyone who has been properly trained can do the experiment, as described in the method of the investigation.  They will expect to gain similar outcomes with sufficient precision that, it could be safely assumed, their analysis will lead them to draw the same conclusions.  

The crucial claims of religion, on the other hand, are not these sorts of facts.  The claims of one or more particular witnesses of certain events that occurred at some point in the past are the product of the lives of individuals and communities, and they are more than social history.  Religious claims will extend to the meaning and significance of the lives and life events of particular people, and will also include claims about things that are absolutely not open to the methods of Science to investigate, even (most probably) at the time at which they originally occurred.  Taking Christianity (or Judaism and some others) in particular, religious claims are made about God's interactions with the world, with Nature, with the cosmos, even if (in some cases) no human involvement is proposed.  How could we know about such claims?  Through Revelation (the claim that the Divine has communicated by some means that (some) humans could understand), and through Tradition, the collected testimony of a Community, such as the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament.  In short, all of these claims of fact, claims to being factual, depend on opinions that are accepted by the keepers of the tradition and passed on as being authoritative.  They cannot be investigated in the scientific sense.

Or, to sum up and to be blunt, religion is not about facts but (merely) opinions.  The person who claims that Science is superior might well point out that the events, words and deeds in question are not repeatable, and so less valid to be considered in the same terms as the facts of science.  They are particular to a person or community, not universally applicable.  They would indeed predict that the same circumstances, if somehow repeated to the exact detail, would not generate the same outcomes.  Now none of that is particularly problematic if the claims made are just about history.  But the important religious claims are more ambitious.  Phenomena are claimed that are not the regular results of science.  Things happen that are not normal.  Violently executed persons come back to life, the local food bank keeps giving out supplies without being restocked, metal axe heads and walking men float on water. (I've translated the claims of the resurrection, the feeding of the 5000, Elisha in 2 Kings 6, and Peter walking with Jesus on Lake Galilee into common language, for emphasis.)  The 'facts' of science are therefore argued with: death can be reversed, new materials can be made out of nothing, forces suddenly cease to operate in the fashion with which we have all been familiar through all of human history. 

In other words, the claims made by the religious are laughable because they break the laws of science.  These unusual events- you might want to call them miracles- are, by definition, anti-scientific, and therefore impossible.  Those who hold such beliefs, in spite of all their education and experience in common with everyone else, are being deliberately irrational.  We might have some respect for those in the past who took such claims seriously, as they knew no better, but those who persevere with such beliefs today warrant pity rather than respect.

You will notice that I have set out in some detail several other issues related to the question of 'breaking the laws of science' which require further investigation, but I won't do that now.  Here I will focus on the concept of law in science, and in the popular imagination, because of the part it plays in the science-religion dialogue.

The point is this.  The language being used conjures an analogy with our human rules and laws.  We have decided, and so we teach children, and everyone else, that certain things should be done, while others should not be done.  Cross when the light is green, stop when it's red.  And so on.  If you don't pay for the items before you leave the shop, expect to be arrested and fined.  If you break the law, which you should not, then you should expect unpleasant consequences, and an insistence that you conform to expectations in the future. 

Generally speaking, and quite properly, we accept this sort of reasoning about our life in the world.  This idea is extended to the behaviour of things in the natural world, other than that they don't get to choose.  If you drop a hammer, or a feather, they will fall to the ground.  Bread can be eaten to keep you alive, but there must be sufficient supply for each hungry mouth.  Water is also necessary for life, but cholera bacteria cause disease and death.  Hammers sink in water, but feathers float on it.

We know these things from experience, the collective experience of generations of observers, and the details and special cases have been tested by scientific investigation and experiment.  Dave Scott even went to the moon to check for us.  

If you let go of an object that isn't moving, it will fall.  This always happens, we agree.  And solid objects that are denser than water will sink.  Always.  The phenomena of nature are consistent, regular, and predictable.  If this doesn't happen, we (especially scientists) go looking for the reasons why.  Perhaps the wind blew the feather upwards.  Even static air slows falling feathers, but not falling hammers (much)- so Dave Scott sorted out that special case for us in the lunar vacuum.  If the falcon feather is still attached to the wing of the bird it grew on, then the flapping bird can fly upwards.  But when the falcon tucks in its wings in a 'stoop' it plummets to the ground like a stone.  

So the behaviour of falling and floating and sinking objects is lawful.  We say that when objects are dropped, they behave according to these laws.  It's what always happens.

But as I've hinted already, there is, potentially at least, a problem here.  Does the very well demonstrated fact that these phenomena are what usually takes place prevent exceptions?  Just because we say that there is a law that heavier-than-air objects plummet to the ground does not make the phenomenon any more certain. It is simply a statement of the regular case.  When we speak of lawful behaviour in science, what we need to be clear about is that we are simply describing what is generally the case.  Remember, if we are doing an investigation or experiment and we get an unusual result, an outlier, an anomaly, we would-be scientists disregard it as a matter of principle.  Our conclusions are based on repeatable data, from which the exceptions have been deliberately excluded.

This is not to undermine the cause of Science.  A good scientist will go back over such anomalous data points and further exercise their curiosity.  What's going on here then?!  Let's check that we've properly controlled all the other variables. Perhaps we missed one.  This is the strength of the peer review process.  Other experimenters who repeat the investigations published by others will be on the lookout for confounding factors that might prove to invalidate the claims of the original researcher.  Science is robust in this regard, both uncovering the innocent mistakes of some researchers, and even catching out fraudsters and liars - though not always as quickly as we might hope.

Nevertheless, there is still the possibility that the world is not as regular as we have come to accept, and therefore to assume that it is.  If our observations, much repeated and thoroughly tested as they may be, then become assumptions about how the world must be, we've stopped being scientists.  In Science, a 'law' is no more or less than this: a statement of what is generally the case.  Just calling it 'the law of gravity' changes nothing about what happens.  If an observer claims that a heavy object rose from the bed of a river and floated, or that a sick person immediately becomes well, or a dead one comes back to life, then we must think carefully about the possible implications.  Firstly, we shouldn't be quick to condemn religious claims.  The fact they are described as miracles emphasises the rationality of the claimants and of the subsequent reporters. "Yes, of course, we know this is unusual!"  By extension, we who hear these claims are not being asked to be gullible.  Since this is odd and strange and very much out of the ordinary you will have to use other means of judgement to decide whether to take such claims seriously.  Are we being presented with a religious claim with profound meaning that is underlined by the literary use of exaggeration?  Is there sleight of hand or magical illusion at play?  Is it mere fantasy presented as reality?  Or the questionable reporting of visions of a hypothetical invisible realm?  These and other possibilities could be explored by the thorough sceptic.  Which is what we all should be.  But very simply, in regard to our discussion about the nature of scientific law, the attitude of a professional scientist, and of Science as a discipline of knowledge about the world, should be one of openness to the possibility that just because such and such a thing usually happens does not mean that there might not be exceptions.  

Does it continue to make sense to speak in the shorthand of certain laws of science?  Absolutely, yes, as long as we understand that such language means that we are describing what usually happens, the phenomena as they normally occur.  The only danger is in misunderstanding the idea of lawfulness meaning that other scenarios are somehow forbidden.  That nature would be broken if something else happened.  Or that (a hypothetical) God was breaking God's own universe by making unnatural things happen within it, on a whim.  That scenario would then lead some to say that God was unreliable, capriciously changing the rules of the game in an irrational manner.  But this betrays the assumptions we might have made about what God being reliable should mean.  

We could stop here, but you might be dissatisfied unless I go on to say a bit more about theory as well as law.

It is the very basis of science that the cosmos, our world, our bodies and the stuff of our existence all behave predictably.  It is this assumption, that the world behaves in a regular and repeatable manner, that is at the very foundation of the scientific worldview.  By using the word assumption, you might think I am suggesting there is something to be suspicious about.  Now it may be that, say, 400 years ago, there might have been reasons to be suspicious.  Sure, some phenomena are regular enough, but so many others are not so regular. [Darwin had to manage without Mendel's genetics because of this.] Looking back, we might decide that some of the accounts and explanations given for the way the world works were more the stuff of creative speculation, if not outright superstition. [Consider how long it was before the cell theory of disease was accepted.] But the assumption of regularity in the world is now held with a high level of confidence.  This is because the discipline of Science has been doing more than simply collecting lots of data, and looking for regular patterns in it, such as the more A you have, the more B is produced.

Having been good empirical investigators, refusing to make assumptions about what the world is really like until investigating it properly, earlier scientists accumulated lots of results on which to then build ideas about how the world works.  Slowly but surely, by fits and starts, they worked out which variables were key in causing certain changes, and which were incidental.  Having identified the potential cause of a particular change, they were a vital step closer to identifying why changing A results in more B.  They were able to move on from simply describing patterns to offering explanations, from law to theory.  The pattern and law tells us what happens.  To begin with, there were no reasons for these events- to attempt to explain is to put forward a theory.  The more data we have that is compatible with the theory- the developing conception of 'how it works' - the stronger the theory becomes.

Not only that, but a developing scientific theory then gives rise to new predictions, and thus to new experiments.  The results of those experiments, combined with the earlier data and the ideas which were thus suggested either show the failure of the theory, the need to modify it in some way, or serve to confirm its explanatory power.  What began as a regular pattern in a small sample of data thus became a confirmed and general phenomenon- a law.  And the production of stronger and stronger theories which logically and rationally explain why the lawlike behaviour occurs then adds further support to our confidence that our claims to know what is going on and why it is going on are well founded. 

So the concept of scientific laws turns out to be significant and valid because the cosmos really is a regular place, where what happens today is very much like what happened yesterday, and will very likely be repeated tomorrow. 

Our general confidence in Science as a way of knowing about the world is also validated as we now have good explanations for very many of the regular patterns and phenomena we have studied, from the sub-microscopic scale to the cosmic scale, and everywhere in between.  As discussed in earlier posts, generations of scientists have now collected data on which to base their informed guesses about what the underlying mechanisms of nature might be at the relevant scales.  Those speculations gave rise to new predictions, which after further rounds of testing have left a secure body of ideas that continue to pass scrutiny.  Their explanatory ideas- what we now call theories- have so far proved adequate to not only explain the initial data but also prove fruitful at suggesting new experiments which generate further outcomes that are compatible with what came beforehand. 

And you may well see where this is taking us.  The discipline of Science has been developing for such a significant period of time now that it has diversified and divided into several branches.  But this division is not at all a separation: the theories developed in Physics are now seen to be extremely fruitful in Chemistry, and Cell Biology and Genetics now also are seen to depend on both the findings of Physics and Chemistry.  

So the assumption of regularity in the cosmos has been tested and scrutinised in all these ways.  Repeated observations and the collection of very large data sets continue to confirm that many phenomena occur with predictable regularity in many different settings, even to the far reaches of the visible universe, and down to molecular and atomic levels.  Explanatory theories have been developed, some or perhaps many of which proved inadequate to cover the majority of cases, but those that remain are fruitful in giving a rational account of events and phenomena across the full spectrum of subdisciplines in Science, from nuclear physics to palaeontology.  The cosmos is indeed lawful and those laws are seen to interconnect with consistency - as seen through the lens of Science.

Diagram from Wikipedia accessed 8.8.22

This Venn diagram of the relationship between data, description and explanation offers an important perspective.  The central portion where the two sets overlap identifies the data which empirical science seeks and collects.  The scientific method requires the proposal of testable predictions, which must generate repeatable data.  If such data is obtained, then firstly a 'law' may be formulated.  Secondly, an explanation can be suggested from which further predictions can be proposed.  

But this does not exhaust the possibilities of what may be real; the entire set of phenomena that might take place in the cosmos.  On the right are some descriptions of events that do not lead to repeated confirmatory measurements.  But they still happen and any of us might observe them.  They are not in the realm of happenings suitable for scientific investigation.

And on the left is another region of the 'theories' set which is outside of the region where repeated testing of a scientifically valid prediction could be carried out. Ideas about how the world works could be proposed, that are compatible with what we know from empirical science, but are not, in fact, scientifically testable.  Now strictly speaking, that ought to mean that such ideas are not scientific in any meaningful sense of the term, but as mentioned elsewhere, this is also normal for Science.  Theories are accepted as being scientific even if they are underdetermined.  Such steps of... imagination might later be proved right when methods are developed to test them, but until then, they are simply speculation.  As scientists, or as observers of practitioners of Science, we can be comfortable with this.

What I hope to have shown therefore is that we can live with contentment in this age that is very much shaped by Science and Technology, operating according to rational principles that are very much informed by the Scientific worldview.  We know a great deal about the world because of the Sciences, and, importantly, we understand a great deal about how it works.  Some of those theoretical ideas will doubtless change again in the future, as new discoveries require some theories to be changed beyond recognition.  Science does not offer the hope of complete knowing and understanding.  

But we should not be fooled by those who assert that our ambition should be for knowledge and explanation that is only obtained by means of doing Science.  "There is nothing but what our senses and measuring instruments give us the means to discover."  That is a hypothesis, and it may be true.  It may or may not be possible to test (aspects of it) scientifically.  But there could also be more to the cosmos than we can perceive by sense perception, whether enhanced or not by our scientific technologies.  Some might hope in vain for miracles that are, in fact, never going to take place because the cosmos/God does not behave that way.  Or perhaps such events are happening right in front of us, and we aren't paying attention.  Whichever of these possibilities is in fact the case, I hope to have shown that Science does not provide us the complete means to know about everything that there might be in the cosmos or about ourselves, or what any putative divinity might be up to.  And if there are any such phenomena, it is simply wrong to suggest that so-called laws of science are necessarily violated or broken.

'Miracles' seem to occur with great regularity in Star Trek, despite Scotty's protestations to Captain Kirk that he can't change the laws of physics in time to save the USS Enterprise and its crew from yet another fatal disaster.  In 'The Naked Time,' Scotty says he needs at least 30 minutes to make the necessary alterations, but succeeds in doing so in much less time.  This is just as well, as no episode ever lasts 30 minutes!  Is there something in the nature of humans that suggest that even in a modern world of science and advanced technology, we seem to think that we might break out of the limits of science?
Postscript: This in today's news, giving a dramatic example of the process of updating 'laws of physics': Scientists say they may have challenged one of Newton's fundamental laws of physics - the conservation of momentum "Ultimately, the principles of how a space's curvature can be harnessed for locomotion may allow spacecraft to navigate the highly curved space around a black hole," say the researchers. Tuesday 9 August 2022 13:55, UK

While in this exciting story, a century-old puzzle about the inner planets has been significantly resolved with the aid of a new scientific model.  The prevailing theories of the dynamics of the solar system suggest that the inner planets should orbit faster than they do, and this seemed to put a question mark against the laws of physics that 'ought' to apply.  Caltech Professor Paul Bellan's team have succeeded in creating a more complex model that brings together a wider range of scientific theories that generates predictions combining what else we know with this problem to finally give an adequate explanation.  Not only that, but the new model also serves to explain some other apparently unrelated phenomena about the behaviour of the sun. Successful models and theories are fruitful. Reported on 21 7 22

https://www.independent.co.uk/space/scientists-inner-solar-system-laws-physics-b2128460.html

1. Stained Glass "Science" in the lobby of NSU 0528.JPG   Stained-glass windows in Novosibirsk State University CC-BY-SA-4.0

Image Creator: Rayne Zaayman-Gallant / EMBL  Copyright: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 © European Molecular Biology

2. https://moon.nasa.gov/resources/331/the-apollo-15-hammer-feather-drop/  

3. Gravity cartoon sourced from https://heterodoxology.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/law-of-gravity-enforced.jpg

4. Brian Diskin's cartoon from http://www.hutchk12.org/natphys/NSTA_Science101theorylaw.pdf

4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scientific_law_versus_Scientific_theories.png

5. #Scotty:"I Can't Change The Laws of Physics" Star Trek:  The Naked Time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xD9qEdHFIE