Your view appears to be very balanced to me.
Thanks so much for your comments!!!
To my crazy brain,
Science is not all or nothing. It is a mix.
I'm not convinced that the word 'science' always refers to one single thing, to one defining essence that everything that we call 'science' possesses and nothing that we wouldn't call 'science' possesses.
It can be truly great at analyzing current day processes. Applause!
The natural sciences (physical and biological) provide an extraordinarily good conceptual framework for things like engineering. They are very good at generating predictions and techniques upon which technologies are based. More abstractly, they provide us with a great deal of knowledge about what the physical world contains and how those things interact with each other. We have learned a great deal in biology about how life functions on the histological, physiological and molecular levels. And we have uncovered lots of sometimes rather arcane mathematical correspondences between particular physical variables and other kinds of physical variables in physics.
But natural science is far less effective as a metaphysics, as a fundamental account of reality itself. since it begs as many questions as it answers.
I don't have a whole lot of confidence in the so-called "social sciences" at all. They seem to me to be 'sciences' only by courtesy. They have very little explanatory or predictive power. (I do have quite a bit or interest and respect for cognitive science though.)
But it is likely not as great at knowing the future or knowing the past.
The past is the easier of the two, since it leaves traces, however fragmentary and ambiguous. So we can produce hypotheses about what occurred in the past based on our historical evidence. Those hypotheses may or may not be true (correspond to what really happened in reality) but we don't seem to have any way of knowing for certain whether or not they do. So there's an iffyness to our knowledge claims about the past.
The future is a tougher problem, since the nature of the future is more mysterious. Is the future fixed as the past at least seems to be? Or is the future a superposition of a whole host of possibility states? So if we make a prediction about what's going to happen tomorrow, does that prediction even have a truth value until tomorrow rolls around and makes it either T or F? (Aristotle first wrote about that 'problem of future contingents' some 2300 years ago and it's still an open question today.)
People today often pretend to have knowledge of the future, based on
models of how they believe the future will unfold. They justify it by pointing to things like celestial mechanics where we can predict the positions of planets in the future with great accuracy.
And yes, this is where, an unproven assumption, on either side, can profoundly alter interpretations of data.
The problem is that these kinds of predictions are only accurate for the simplest sorts of physical systems. As systems grow more complex, they typically grow more unpredictable. That's why engineers have to build and test prototypes. Something unforeseen almost always appears and makes the system do something what wasn't predicted.
And a mathematical model even correctly determined from a current, observable, repeatable process may be substantially off the mark when projected into either the future or the past.
The likelihood of that increases as complexity increases. There are also difficulties like nonlinear dynamics.
Reality could have been very different than any mathematical model, because trillions of unknown, but real, variables were never included in it.
Yes, I'm inclined to agree.
In this kind of arena of Scientific study, involving unwitnessed events in time, a Theory is not automatically equal to Fact.
Well, I guess that I'd define a 'fact' as an existing state of affairs. I think of facts as the truth-makers that make propositions true or false. So a proposition (including a statement of a scientific hypothesis) is T iff it corresponds to the facts. The sentence 'Paris is the capital of France' is T iff it's a fact that Paris is the capital of France. So sure, a theory is never equal to a fact, though the variables of true theories would need to include all true facts of whatever sort the theory is addressing as its substitution instances. (By that I mean that a theoretical statement like F=ma would need to be true of all relevant real life instances of forces, masses and accelerations.)
The problem, especially when we are talking about the future, is that we typically have no way of knowing what the facts will turn out to be. We can perhaps narrow in on what the facts are likely to be probabilistically with models, but not always and rarely with total accuracy. Estimating those future probabilities exposes us to the problem of induction as well and itself rests on shaky foundations.
And I really think that people intuitively know this.
Yes, I think so.
Science is great, but, in my opinion, it has limits.
I strongly agree. It's ironic when self-styled atheists attack the supposed evils of "religion" but then turn right around and put science on a pedestal as if it was their evangelical new religion, somehow synonymous with reason itself, a supposed source of ultimate truth that non-scientists must unhesitatingly believe based on nothing more than authority and faith, on pain of being denounced as "deniers" and "anti-science".
Can it really answer all questions regarding history, morality, purpose, even human behavior? Perhaps it can to various degrees of success, but precisely?
Of course not.
You won't answer because the answer is negative. 
