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First, so I'm not misunderstood: Science does of course exist and it is not religion. But:
- Not all published science is, in fact, science. The Replication Crisis is a real problem, meaning that a significant portion of published science is actually incorrect.
- Only a very tiny portion of the population reads scientific papers and has the ability to understand them. That includes scientists and other well-educated people who don't have any expertise on the specific field. Being a renown physicist doesn't mean you know anything about psychology.
- Scientific papers are filtered through science journalists who might or might not have any expertise in the field and might or might not understand the papers they write about. They then publish what they understood in a more accessible format (e.g. popular science magazines).
- This is then read by minimum wage journalists with no understanding of any of the science, and they publish their misunderstandings in newspapers and other non-scientific publications.
- This is then read by the general public who usually lack the skills and/or the resources to fact-check anything at all.
- These members of the general public then take what they understood as fact and base their world view on it. At this point it hardly matters whether their source of incorrect information is the stack of Chinese whispers I wrote about above, or if it's just straight-up made up by some religious leader.
There's thousands of little (or big) misunderstandings in non-science that people believe and have faith in, that forms people's world views and even their political views. And people often defend their misconceptions, like they would defend some religious views.
(Again, just to make sure I'm not misunderstood: I am no exception to this either. I got my field where I have a lot of knowledge, but for most fields I blindly trust some experts, because I have no way to verify stuff. I, too, for example, put my faith in doctors to heal my illnesses, even though I have no way to verify whether anything they say is true or not.)
Science often doesn't adhere to the scientific method, especially stuff that made it into pop science. The Stanford Prison Experiment, while still taught in schools to this day, was an unscientific mess that couldn't be reproduced even once, which didn't stop it from getting published and printed in school text books the world over.
In fact, thanks to peer reviews being done as sloppily as they are done nowadays, between 30-60% of all published papers aren't reproducible.
Believing that the scientific method "just works" is faith, because right now scientific claims often only go through superficial peer reviews and only a fraction of claims ever go through a reproduction study.
Like all human endeavors, science is imperfect and often fails us. Yet still it is the best system we have for learning how the world works. And when it does work it is very powerful. Look at for instance the Michelson-Morley experiment to find the ether. When this experiment produced negative results it upended our understanding of electromagnetism and caused a revolution in science. Scientific progress can be slow, but learning from our failures is built into the system.