I think you gentlemen are all right and wrong about economics.
It looks like some of your are getting mixed up between methodology and results.
Economics is a social science in that at its core, it studies how people behave.
Economists use many of the same tools and methods to try and develop and test theories as classical scientists.
However, the problem with economics is that the subject of its study - people, is both extremely fluid and also highly adaptable.
Pure sciences study subjects that by and large do not change their behaviour, be it an atom or an animal. That is the core reason why their experiments are repeatable.
Atoms cannot learn from past 'mistakes' of other atoms, but humans can and do. If someone did something and lost a lot of money, they are not going to do the same thing again because if given a do-over, thus economic experiments are hard to reproduce.
On a maco level, by merely studying past human economic behaviour and publishing the results, economists can and do change the behaviour of the population and/or government policy so much that their results become impossible to repeat and valid even, indeed, especially if they were right in the first place.
The best pure science parallel would be with quantum mechanics - that by merely observing something you are also altering its outcome.
That is why economic theories require far more, and bigger leaps of intuition than pure sciences. That is also its greatest vulnerability for abuse, where people with agendas and/or axes to grind insert so much loaded assumptions and biased limitations as to fundamentally determine the outcome irrespective of what actual data you load into the model.
Most of the pundits you see speaking on TV or quoted in mass media are not really serious economists, but rather publicity chasing hacks and/or intellectual prostitutes willing to say just about anything the people writing their cheques want them to.
It's all a giant self-serving circle-jerk designed to serve rich vested interest groups, and most western government economists are little better, chosen only because they say what politicians want to hear (who in turn are in the pockets of super-rich donors).
Please don't mistake those cretins for real economists or the cookie cutter super-rich written and serving mantras, like the evils of 'big government' and the magical powers of the 'market', as real economic fundamentals.
