Well, we’re really talking about a few different things. Allow me to try to piece this out, and please correct me if I’ve misunderstood your argument.
First I don’t think you’re commenting on ‘science’ as a principle, i.e. the process of prediction and controlled experimentation to find new knowledge. This, in principle, can decide between any two competing theories. We do not need to take this principle for acquiring information on faith, it is something that we can and do do ourselves. When I say that this process, in principle, is better than the process used by the Catholic Church (e.g. direct divine inspiration of an appointed ruler, unquestioning acceptance of a set of holy documents), I’m not appealing to faith or authority, and I don’t think my statement is necessarily comparable to other societies that have felt the same way.
What you seem to commenting on are 1) the practice of science, i.e. the peer review process, the institutional structure, and the fallible human scientists themselves, and 2) the popular understanding of science, how non-scientists internalize and deal with what the institutions of science tell them (or what they think they tell them).
- The practice of science can again be divided into a “theory of the practice” (ToP) and a “practice of the practice” (PoP). The ToP is that, because people’s beliefs, assumptions, or poor reasoning can lead them to err unintentionally (or intentionally), the work that they do in applying the theory of science is only valid when a disparate group of peers (assumed to have different biases, shortcomings, etc.) is able to review the procedure and confirm any experimental finding. The PoP is how that theory is actually carried out.
Again, it seems that the scientific ToP is better suited to discovering new facts about the world than is the Catholic ToP, which even in theory is something like what you’re alleging to be the case for Science. The scientific ToP accepts many of your allegations (e.g. “Why not tell a spun story to exaggerate the events? Why be deeply critical of your findings when they already seem to show what you want them to show?”), and attempts to address them with an institution that checks human frailty by making every finding, no matter who by, subject to review.
The PoP of science hews reasonably close to the theory. Granted, the peer review process itself is vulnerable when peers share characteristics or biases (e.g. minorities are excluded), and it is not always practically possible to repeat every experiment, but it is hard to deny that the technique has drastically increased the pace of discovery, despite its shortcomings. Humans can be untrustworthy, but the system is designed so that one must not trust the individuals, per se, but rather the process through which the individuals must go to have their work established as reliable. So, here again we can strip out a great deal of trust and faith in authority, and instead put faith in our own rational acceptance of a system designed to produce and confirm facts.
- The popular relationship with science can often be religious-feeling, but it doesn’t have to come down to faith in authority figures. A lay individual who has not personally confirmed the positions she’s come to accept can still reasonably rely on the theory and the ToP of science to conclude that most of what is published in peer-reviewed journals is more-or-less accurate. It’s also rational to assume that most of what the mainstream media reports about those findings is reported in good faith and their intent is not to mislead (again, an appeal can be made to a ToP of journalism that encourages faithful reporting, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion).
Of course, that a rational case can be made for trusting the products of science does not mean that all trust that is placed in science is rational. One can trust for bad reasons. But this is a very different complaint. It is a complaint about poorly reasoning individual humans, rather than one about any specific aspect of science itself.