There's no such thing as assuming the uniformity of physical laws. A lot of people say science is based on that assumption, but they're not even wrong. It's a nonsense phrase. There are only statements about reality that are always true, and statements about reality that aren't always true. That's not an assumption; that's a tautology. A "physical law that isn't always true" isn't an alternative hypothesis from some sort of alternative nonscientific worldview, one we need to assume isn't how the universe works in order to do science. It's just a contradiction in terms.
Thanks for your feedback, but I don't think you quite grasp the
problem of induction. Hume's
Doctrine of Uniformity (or uniformitarianism) is a doctrine, not a fact.
I think I understand the problem of induction; but I don't see how it applies here. Induction is a problem to the extent that we rely on it to judge the probability that our opinion about how the world works is correct; but
whether we know what the laws of physics are is immaterial to what the laws of physics
are. Induction is an epistemology problem; we're debating ontology.
Your other link leads to a "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." page. Assuming what you meant was the "Uniformity of Nature" link inside your first link, well, as that links says, "In geology, uniformitarianism has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the key to the past" (that events occur at the same rate now as they have always done); many geologists now, however, no longer hold to a strict theory of gradualism... Today, Earth's history is considered to have been a slow, gradual process, punctuated by occasional natural catastrophic events." To whatever extent assumptions of uniformity are of any use to working scientists, they can be and sometimes are refuted by observation, and science does not vanish in a puff of logic.
It is quite possible that some of the phenomena we observe in nature came about from different physical laws or are miracles, i.e. events that contravene the laws of nature. We can never be sure that they are not,
Sure we can. No, it is not possible. "Events that contravene the laws of nature" is a phrase that can only refer to fiction. Hume's thinking on this matter in "Of Miracles" is contaminated by the pre-scientific habits of thought that were near-universal at that time. People still thought of "laws of nature" as analogous to legal laws, enacted by a lawgiver; God commands that action shall equal reaction, and the atoms obey. It's the historical reason for why even now we call them "laws".
But strip away that Renaissance mindset, and imagine yourself actually observing an event contravening this equivalence. Suppose the EM Drive is confirmed to work. (And not just by enthusiastic NASA engineers desperately hoping for starships, but by CERN physicists accustomed to doubting their measuring devices.) Would you call it "a miracle", "an event that contravenes the laws of nature"? Or would you call it "Newton's Third Law of Motion follows his Law of Gravity into history's dustbin"? When Mercury didn't move the way Newton said it must, we didn't infer a miracle. We inferred General Relativity.
You're probably inclined to respond, "But that's epistemology! Just because we can't know it's a miracle doesn't mean it's not a miracle.". Fair enough. So let's talk ontology. What is an "event that contravenes the laws of nature"? To answer that, we have to answer, "What is a law of nature that an event contravenes"? A law of nature is a proposition that the world does something. What's the ontological difference between a proposition that's a "law of nature that an event contravenes" and a proposition that's "wrong"? My contention is that supporters of the Doctrine of Uniformity cannot supply any principled conceptual difference between a falsehood about the universe that's a "contravened natural law", and a falsehood about the universe that's "not really a natural law".
just as we can never be 100% certain whether or not a god fine-tuned the universe to create beings like ourselves.
What's a "god"? What's a "universe"? If everything we can see was in fact intelligently fine-tuned in order to create beings like ourselves, why would you call the perpetrator a "god" rather than an "alien"? For all we know it might not even be smarter than us; maybe what we see was the high-school project of a child that simply had access to its species' vastly superior technology and it did its fine-tuning literally, by fiddling with the knobs by trial-and-error until something intelligent came out in the debris. What's the conceptual difference between a "god" and an "alien"?
