I am by no means a philosopher of science, but that doesn’t seem to stop me from offering my opinion. Since the discussion seems to veering in that direction, I thought I might offer my take.
I view science as a game, like baseball or football. You follow the rules, and what you end up with is a scientific conclusion. Most of us think science does a pretty good job at arriving at good descriptions of how the universe works, so we keep using those rules. It is the success of science that justifies its use.
Science is but one epistemology of many, and I think it would be foolhardy to claim that science is the only viable epistemology. However, having an epistemology is better than having none. I would argue that we need rules for how we acquire knowledge, and those rules have to be attached to the conclusions they land on. If we have no rules then we have no knowledge. If a claim can become true by merely uttering it, then what does truth mean?
Being clear about the rules we use to arrive at knowledge is absolutely vital. It allows us to understand the boundaries of certainty around that knowledge. The rules of science can help us understand the empirical world, but science simply can’t tell us about ontological truths.