...I explore this challenge in my book,
What Science Is and How It Really Works. If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that the ability of a theory to predict unobserved phenomena and lead to amazing new technologies is no proof that said theory is “true.”
For example, in addition to explaining the dynamics of the known solar system, Isaac Newton’s mechanics enabled stunningly accurate predictions of other astronomical phenomena, such as Halley’s comet arriving later than normal in 1759 due to the gravitational effects of passing close to Jupiter. Even more impressive, in the early 1800s when astronomers determined that the orbit of Uranus deviated from Newtonian predictions, they concluded that Newton’s theory was not wrong; rather, the existence of a previously unobserved planet was posited and was later found exactly where it was expected to be (and named Neptune).
Such successes of the scientific revolution were so impressive that philosophers developed whole new theories of knowledge to try to explain how scientists appeared to have used observation and reason to discover fundamental truths. In doing so, both scientists and epistemologists attempted to dismiss what logicians have known since antiquity: that
no amount of correctly predicted effects can prove a hypothesized cause. Attempts to do so commit the fallacy of “affirming the consequent”—in other words, scientific theories are always underdetermined by the available data.
...In 1859, astronomers determined that the orbit of Mercury was not behaving, over time, as Newtonian mechanics predicted. So another new planet (named Vulcan) was posited and its probable position calculated. Unlike the prediction of Neptune’s existence, this supposition did not pan out; rather, Newtonian mechanics was an incorrect theory in this context. Its conceptions of time, space, and simultaneity were simply wrong. A different scientific theory—Einstein’s theory of relativity—was required to later explain Mercury’s abnormal perihelion precession....