Disagree. You SHOULD believe that which is adequately supported.
Faith has no place in science.
When a scientific claim is made, say for instance, any and all copper conducts electricity, it is a universal claim about copper. But our experience and observation of copper is miniscule and nonrandom as compared to universality.
In the case of copper we are talking about the exhaustive study of a material and cataloguing of it’s behaviors. We also understand the atomic structure of copper and the way it bonds with other atoms. It is the underlying structure of the electrons and how they are shared between atoms that accounts for the conductive properties of copper.
There is a thing to recognize about this. Copper has properties A, B, and C. If you find a substance somewhere that has properties A, B, and F… then that’s not copper. And if it has different properties that will be because it has a different nucleus.
But how do we know what is far away is the same as what is close to us? Well, it starts with a guess. Any guess will do and it doesn’t matter how you come up with the guess. What’s important is the follow up.
You could say, “What causes this pencil to fall down is the same thing that causes the planets to circle the sun, and that same thing is responsible for the structure of the galaxy. And those spots we noticed out there, we noticed they look like our galaxy. They seem really small, but that is really the effect of the propagation of light, and actually, they are galaxies just as large as ours. And what holds THOSE together is the same thing that makes this pencil fall to the ground.”
That’s just a guess. How does it become more than a guess? You quantify exactly what you mean by “the thing that pulls the pencil down” into an equation that says something very specific. Not just “pulls down” but “a force toward the center of mass inversely proportional to the square of the distance”. Now you can make calculations and the guess goes from something vague which always leaves you a loop hole to escape the question of whether you were right or not to a very specific and quantifiable prediction, that can be duplicated by anyone (show your work!) to state explicitly what should be observed if your guess about how things work is correct.
Newton’s guess about gravity was really close. So close that people couldn’t tell the difference between his calculation and the actual orbit of mercury for a couple hundred years. Einstein refined that guess and interpreted what it meant in a different way. As a result we’ve not only calculated the orbits of our solar system to such success as to be able to launch a craft from earth and hit every planet in our system, but also to accurately describe the way the galaxy should hold together so that our guess is accurate to a very high degree.
How do we know that those tiny spots are galaxies, and that they are held together by gravity behaving exactly like our gravity behaves? Because when you do the math it describes what you see in a telescope perfectly, so long as you interpret what you see to be just like where we are. If those galaxies behaved differently, then it would be evident that our theory of gravity doesn’t have a full grip on what’s going on elsewhere.
But you’ve got to extend your guesses as far as they go, then CHECK to see if it’s right as best you can.
Having said that, how would we falsify this scientific claim to establish confirmation when falsification is dependent on observation and deductive affirmation?
The statement about copper is dependent on what you are talking about: copper. Copper is made of atoms, which are made of electrons, neutrons and protons. The behavior of these objects is very well understood through a very wide range of environmental conditions, including accelerating and colliding at near the speed of light.
There are certainly conditions these objects can be in that we haven’t been able to study, such as past the event horizon of a black hole, in which case our statements about their behavior might well break down. But in all conditions that we’ve studied these objects it is only reasonable to imagine they behave the same way elsewhere as they do here. Why is that reasonable? Because we see them over a very wide range of conditions, and distances. We can study the light emitted by distant galaxies and the only way to explain the way that light behaves is that it was emitted by matter just like ours. Since our equations continue to explain the behavior of the phenomena then it is evident the equations are still correct at that distance. And it evidently doesn’t change with distance, to the extent we’ve been able to observe. Why should we imagine the rules suddenly stop working when we aren’t looking?