“Science is not the only way of knowing.” This is true: Sensory perception, while not producing a completely faithful rendering of the world outside our heads, results in real knowledge. Humans have perceived the outside world and learned about it long before we developed the scientific method. The same goes for practical or tacit knowledge. An animal knows where the next water source is without doing science.
Still, every time I hear the phrase, I get alarmed. The speaker almost always wishes to advance a “way of knowing” like ancient wisdom, faith, and spirituality that only feel like knowing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Not everything has to be connected to the pursuit of knowledge. Faith and related practices can lead to meaning, community, and other worthwhile things. But they’re not ways of knowing.
The reason is that those pursuits aren’t amenable to critical enquiry or falsifiability. Non-scientific ways of knowing have that falsifiability built in: If you erroneously believe that you know how to ride a bicycle, you’ll quickly change your mind once you get on one. Faith and related pursuits do not have a similar reality test, and therefore don’t qualify as a way of knowing.
Nehaveigur 