The worst is we don't know what we don't know. That sounds trite, but in fact the scientific method is about generating a consensus among "rational, educated, intelligent people."

That doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't even mean it's objective. The best you can get is a consensus among a subset of humans that certain things happen because of certain other things, and certain models can predict some of these things with limited accuracy.

This turns out to be useful for human experiences, as far as it goes. But we literally can't imagine what connections we're not aware of, what formalisms and models we can't create because our brains are too limited by their evolutionary wiring, and what experiences we're not having because same.

You could argue that these invisible imperceptible things can't affect us, by definition. But we don't know that's true. There could an entire universe of influences and abstractions we're not aware of.

And there probably is. Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe?

What we think of science is more like the gap between the smartest 1% and the rest of the population. Science is a good way to make those 1% insights sticky and useful to everyone else.

But it's highly presumptuous to assume that human cognition has no limits, and the universe fits comfortably inside our brains.