why such huge veneration of science?

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The first problem with science is that you gotta keep changing your mind every damn time you learn something.
The second problem with science is that you gotta learn something and learning is soooo haaaard.
The third problem with science is that when you learn something new it means that what you said yesterday was wrong, which means you're wrong, which means you're actually a useless sub-human person, which is embarrassing because no one wants to look like a moron even if it was yesterday. Except politicians, apparently.

It's much easier to just learn something once and live your whole life being certain it's the last word in truth.

And that's really what science is all about isn't it? Making our lives easier?
QED science proves Religion.

Besides, science is only used to make new smartphones that do the same thing but make the megacorps richer and TVs are good enough now to watch all the prefab drama one could ever want, so science just needs to stop, again, like it did in the dark ages, everything is good enough.

I'm not sure whether you were responding to me, but I wasn't judging psychiatry in hindsight. Their statements were unsupportable at the time. They went way beyond what the data, and that's a no-no.

Just saying 'It fits the data, so it must be right' isn't science. Even the flat-earth, geocentric cosmology in Enoch I fit the data just fine. (Eratosthenes' work with shadows cast at different latitudes didn't disprove it because you could interpret his data as a parallax measurement of the distance to the sun. And why wouldn't you? Put yourself in their shoes. It would make the sun only 4,000 miles away, which would be a lot more believable to the average Mesopotamian goat herder than the idea that it's 92 million miles away and held in orbit by a magical force-field.)

Real science requires doing a contrapositive assessment and looking for other models that might fit the data. When you don't do that, you're not being a scientist. When you refuse to do it even after the mistake has been pointed out to you, you're a fraud.

I agree with you that re-learning is the big bottle-neck, but it doesn't just trip up the laity.

Almost everything around us these days has had a science input. And the idea that what you knew in science yesterday is now wrong is largely untrue. Yes that happens, but at a practical level it's rare. Almost everything in this modern world, shows just how often science has been right. Without science being right, we would not have plastic. We would not have television. We would have only wool, cotton and silk. We would not have cars, powerboats, aircraft or spacecraft. We would not have GPS, let alone computers. We wouldn't even have electronic calculators, let alone be able to store gigabytes of data on a pinhead. We wouldn't have mapped DNA, let alone understand cells and disease. We wouldn't have organ transplants or replacement hips. We wouldn't have refrigeration or stereos or DVD's. We have so much in this world, because science got it right.

I agree with the first point the OP is making. A lot of scientific studies (especially in the US) are steered toward getting a certain result. A lot of people don't realize this and accept whatever new scientific study is shown in the media or think looking at the abstract suffices. However, to sift the scientific studies that are done well from the junk science, you have to look at the whole research paper.

What do you mean "steered toward getting a certain result?"

Take the example of double-blind medicinal studies on human subjects. We see a lot of studies with results that do not favor the drug companies. Medications with poor effectiveness are regularly rejected, costing companies huge amounts of money and even putting them out of business.

A great many scientists are not achieving the "result" that would keep them in business and yield them profit.

Then we have the climate scientists who are being threatened and fought by the petroleum, coal, and other industries who control a massive portion of the world's money. Some skeptics accuse them of publishing false information. Why would scientists risk their careers, reputations, and lives by publishing false information that interferes so strongly with the world's economy? What would they have to gain by doing so? If a group of scientists fabricated something, how would they possibly prevent other scientists from exposing their lies?

Yes.

But I would add that it's not just wrong it's an impossible, purely ideological, superstition that has nothing to do with science or scientific method.

Oookay. And just what then is the truth of biology - minus Darwinian evolution - if I might ask?

Poor Rupert has blown his own legs off with his own cannon.

He has blithely assumed the fundamental ideological dogma of "science"... i.e. Materialism. The completely unjustifiable assumption that order creates itself by no mechanism and for no reason.

If you're talking about a prime mover - IE, God - as the author of creation, then I actually have no dispute with you. I personally believe in a theistic evolution. There are actually plenty of believers who are also scientists, but who not promote the pseudo-science of creationism, because while biology is provable, God is only knowable by faith. Science, as far as I am concerned, explains the mechanics of how things in the natural world work; just because religion isn't brought into it doesn't mean that the existence of God is denied.

Fair enough, Bill.

Let's start at the ground with an easily demonstrable principle of mechanics known as entropy. Nothing works without entropy. For any physical event to occur there must be a progression from a higher potential to a lower potential. All of our machines, chemistry, weather, etc. etc. can only and do only work entropically.

Entropy applied to biological systems is known as "the Law of Morphology" which, simply stated, says "the more complex an organism and the more often it is replicated the more likely it is that something will go wrong in the process". Evolution does occur but always and only in the direction of entropy. That is, that genetic changes occur when one characteristic is lost allowing some other, previously hidden or recessive, characteristic to be exposed.

So, what is supposed to be the alternative to Darwinism?

As far as this discussion is concerned the only thing provable about biology is that it exists.

I don't believe in "theistic evolution" in the Darwinist sense at all.

It is also a defined Christian doctrine that "If anyone shall say that the existence of God cannot be known with certainty by the light of natural reason alone... anathema sit". Anathema sit means, colloquially, "you are dead wrong and not one of us"

Which branch of Christianity claims anyone who can't know God by reason is anathema? Because I'm a Lutheran, and that sort of theology is utterly alien to what we're taught. For us, God is grasped only by faith, though his handiwork can be seen in the natural world.

This is a very interesting subject to me. Any videos, books, articles, any kind of links, about this subject, please post it. I only have one book that is related to this and it's in Swedish; Forskningsfusket: Så Blir Du Lurad Av Kost- Och Läkemedelsindustrin; which means roughly The Science Hoax: How The Food And Medical Industries Deceive You. I have not found a translation but there might be one out there, or there might be one on the way. I have read and listened to other material dealing with the subject. It was interesting when reading that book, which I'm not finished with, to think about how the author himself most likely has either chosen his words in a carefully diplomatic way or how the editors might have insisted on publishing a carefully diplomatically thought through text. What I mean is that the dynamic he talks about of course is applicable not only to the food and medical industries, or even science as a whole, but virtually everything in society, including his own book, and any book, more so the more people it reaches. This point about how many people it reaches is also something that interests me. This seems to be a phenomenon across the board in society, the more people something reaches the less substance and truth is in it, it goes for any media, medicine, any communication, virtually everything. My own inherent distaste for social life might have a lot to do with this.

Or actually I have one more book that you could say is about this, very much actually. Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness by Jim Keith. Because all of the various mind control techniques described there have connection to science.

For laypeople, "science" is not much different than religion and I think a lot of absolutist people that venerate it to such a degree are merely substituting it as one. What is religion? It's basically some learned person's understanding of the world written down in a book that others than read and take as fact so how is that different than "science" to an unlearned person? You can only demonstrate and understand so much while the rest is just trust and faith in the learned individuals. Are all these people really true believers or do they seek to elevate themselves over the non-believers and skeptical?