Is science the only way to knowledge?

[Vincenzo Vinny G.]

Surely the answer to the thread title is no, science is not the only way to knowledge. However, its track record for furthering our understanding of how the universe works is unsurpassed. There is not a single other human endeavour that even comes close.

Religious beliefs had tens to hundreds of thousands of years to further our knowledge. Modern science has had a few hundred years. Science has had an order of magnitude shorter amount of time to produce an order of magnitude greater body of knowledge.

Can anybody name a single fact revealed by religion that could not have been revealed by science? How many facts revealed by science can you name that could not have been revealed by religion?

Religious people often say "science keeps being proven wrong, how can you trust it"? Firstly, they neglect to realise that it is science that proves itself wrong, not religion that proves it wrong. Secondly, name the last time science was flat-out plain wrong. What tends to happen is that disproven theories continue to be applicable but for a narrower set of conditions. Newtons laws vs General Relativity for instance.

Seriously, how do you test the hypothesis that you're not a brain in a vat? That your cognitive faculties are working properly? That everyone around you are actual people instead of p-zombies?

That's a vacuous argument with no utility. If you were to claim the existence of God, which you know to be true because of x, y and z, I could just as easily turn around and say "seriously, how do you test the hypothesis that you're not a brain in a vat". Arguments of this kind seem to be unique to the religious and philosophers. For some reason, science never has to resort to such arguments. You'll notice that philosophy has been practiced for the last few thousand years and our progress was pretty slow then too.

In summary, things that are true are generally easily shown to be true and science has proven itself to be our best method of establishing truth.

But I never "claimed the existence of God, which I know to be true because of x, y, and z." If I do believe in some higher power, it's not because I'm certain there is one, but because given the data we have, the best explanation is a creator/designer/agent than any non-creator/non-designer/non-agent hypothesis currently available. Being the believer in science that you are, I hope that comes with properly representing views.

And what about basic beliefs, like p-zombies or brain-in-a-vat beliefs? Are they really vacuous? Or do they tell us that some beliefs are impossible to test, and if a belief is impossible to test, it is impossible to arrive at scientifically? This is not some vacuous argument, it is evidence that science as a whole, including individual principles like testability or falsifiability are incapable of giving us all the facts at our disposal. In other words, "as good as science is, it isn't enough on it's own, as you can see, given that it cannot come up with these truths."

The reason many scientists don't make this argument is because most scientists don't work in epistemology. Epistemology is not a physical science, it is a "logical science", if you will.

Not to mention your response totally misses the boat here, as nobody said, not I in my posts, nor this thread title, that science is not the best at arriving at truth. It might or it might not be. Rather, the question is whether science is the ONLY source of truths about the world. Perhaps further scientific investigation into the OP and some scientific readings and experimentation on the wording of my claims will clear this up for you.

ps- Cthulhu Dreaming: I hold that we are rational to accept that solipsism is false, because I allow for non-scientific, non-testable means to arriving at knowledge, namely via epistemic foundationalism.

I don't think solipsism is true, so don't be an idiot.