There's a lot to be said for shutting up and calculating. If I were a physicist, I might subscribe to that myself. Since I can't calculate myself, I try to remain agnostic even to that extent.

That said, physics advances do sometimes come from asking "What if X is real?" The positron and electron spins are both poster children for that. Instead of just shutting up and calculating, people focused on the part of the calculation that seemed to imply the existence of an unobserved thing. We could, in fact, have kept going with a physics in which positrons were merely calculation conveniences; that physics is valid. But we might not have discovered the Standard Model that way.

So I'm of two minds... and in a lot of ways, I'm not really entitled to be of any minds, since my formal education stopped at undergrad, and I'm no longer capable of doing even that much math. I get leery when people with even less education want to "understand" without doing any of the math, because I fear that the best of explanations will only mislead them.