First off, monkeyhead, is that so? Should I make my analogy that was meant to be short and sweet more specific? If there is an iron sphere embedded into a wall out of reach and you don't have a way to hit it with something, you cannot determine from first principles whether it is hollow or solid(if you bring up hitting the wall, you're deliberately missing the point). Second, no, whales are not mammals, because mammal is an arbitrary, and more importantly, modern, category we use based on evolutionary similarities and vague physiological tendencies. If your categories use something else, like, say, beasts roam the land, are usually relevant to either food or work, and have fur, while fish swim in rivers, lakes, and oceans, usually have scales or slimy skin, and often have fins of some sort, then calling it a mammal is ridiculous. So no, it not specifically being predicted for our time, instead of the one it was written in, does not prove jack shit, at least with shitty arguments like that.
They are indeed far better. And yes, they measure things, and if things were different they would measure different things. That's what instruments do, abstract or not. But you could not do it yourself, not in a million years. Other instruments just let you do things you already could with greater precision. Look at small things, make far away things look closer, compare weights more accurately. This is looking at things do far away and in such minute changes of precision, from the bending of light, that we are wholly reliant upon the instrument. Electron microscopes are abstract because they measure things we simply cannot scale ourselves down to look at in a roundabout way. This is the same in the opposite direction.
Now as to my point with that: if we didn't have those instruments, we would not be able to discern the phenomena. The page you linked even said that there were two theories; that we'd gotten gravity wrong for large enough scales, or there was new type of matter we didn't know about. It required the development and refinement of those instruments to be able to say definitively. We don't yet have an instrument for measuring anything spiritual, if there is indeed such. Dismissing it because we as of yet have no instruments that would clue us in as to how there would be a difference in the world if souls [did/didn't] exist seems like a poor judgement call. It's isn't a reason to believe, and there's other reasons to disbelieve, but that seems like a poor one.