I see your point but I get a bit uneasy when someone start equating science and religion. There's no faith in science.
I understand your unease many if not most people in the West are educated from day one that science is just right. Text books are often written w/o equivocation which is why most good professors won't use them for higher level courses preferring to use a cross-section of articles and other non "textbook" sources.
In a perfect world science is nothing more than a tool, a set of guidelines on how to conduct trial and error in an organized way. However, in response to the schism between “science” and the “church” (many early scientists were clergy and later were often still “religious”) science got branded as and co-opted by anti-religious ideologues (both left and right wing) seeking to wrestle power from the “church.”
The more fundamental issue is that all human constructs including science are based on some degree of faith. Even in its purest forms mathematics and symbolic logic need something accepted as a "given" to get the ball rolling. Not to mention the symbol and numbering systems chosen are even culturally based social constructs. As one moves away from reasoning in these most strict forms even more social biases creep in. So by the time one moves science from the realms of mathematics > symbolic logic > chemistry % physics > multi-disciplinary fields such as climatology there are so many socially induced biases that any work in the field is filled with assumptions based on the faith (preconceived beliefs or ideology) of the researchers and even tainted by something as basic as the words used to make the argument.
While one can argue that science by design creates repeatable results which can have powerful predictive powers, this in not an absolute, still being subject to all sorts of human biases especially when applied to policy making. People blame religion for all sorts of evils while those same people give science a free pass for atrocities committed in its name. Both sides of this issue just make excuses for the excesses committed in pursuit of their beliefs claiming they are not representative while simultaneously claiming the other sides excesses are representative.
True believers are IMO the same regardless of how they derive their beliefs. It's been that way for thousands of years and nothing has happened recently to indicate that has changed. IMO true believers from opposing left and right wing ideologies are much more fundamentally alike than they are different. The differences are superficial.
Cheers,
Dean
