Mate, first of all: chill. Second of all: me, mincing words? You’re the one who’s decided the phrase ‘natural philosophy’ only applies to ancient Greeks. It’s literally just what science used to be called. Being very very hung up on a specific definition of a word or phrase and excluding other common usages is not a good basis for an argument. There need have been no argument at all. ‘We call it science now’ seems to be what you meant, but it’s not coming across well

Oh. And you can still do science without a theory. It’s called data collection and it is absolutely vital.

Edit: a good example would be Rosalind Franklin’s work on the structure of DNA. She did some incredible science with x-ray diffraction which was vital to Crick and Watson’s theory of the structure.

Edit X2: also ‘doing it implicitly’ is totally fucking fine if the result of being invalidated is you create a more refined model of reality. Which is, like, pretty much what the whole thing about astronomy is…