6/15/16 Science Is Like A Religion?

    My jaw about dropped the other day.  My brother and I were discussing the tragedy in Orlando, and he was explaining to me the all or nothing agenda of the Islamic extremists as he understands it from his influences listening to too much AM radio.  He might have a point, I don't know, but I thought it a good time to inject my opinion that if we all just got real and stopped defending fairy tales of which we have no proof, the world might be a better place.
    I said something like if we were all atheists, we wouldn't waste so much energy on these beliefs in ghosts and spirits.  Maybe more people could contribute to the sciences.  After all, I said confidently, it is through science we came up with the modern combustion engine, medicines to fight polio and many other diseases.  Science has brought us out of the caves and into the modern world we live in.  You can't argue about the contributions science has given the world, it has made us who we are, good or bad.
    As if he was born a contrarian, he turned the table on our discussion and said science is just another form of religion.  Uh, no, I said.  Science doesn't run on faith, everything "science" is backed up by repeatability, and proof.  He then brought up Isaac Newton, saying he was one of the great scientists and yet he was heavily involved in the church.  Not knowing Newton's personal life off the top of my head, my only defense to that is it was the 1600s or 1700s.  If you didn't believe, there was a good chance of you getting your head chopped off.  Believe me, if a church representative came to the door, sword in hand and asked "do you believe in a higher power?"  Hell yes I do.  There is believing in your ideas and there is preservation of the self.
    I told him it is awesome to hold your opinion, Mom got you immunized before you could utter a word.  You can say you don't believe in science and therefore modern medicine, but there you are, all protected from measles, rubella, and twenty or thirty other things that normally would have killed or maimed you before the age of ten. 
    How can I have a conversation with somebody when they can so easily spit at what I trust in the most?  He also spun off bringing up the work being done at the supercollider, saying they are just making stuff up, ummm, Dr. so and so himself has said he doesn't blah blah.  Maybe one person working there has a negative opinion, but once the truly smart people determined there are electrons and neutrons and protons, it must follow that they are composed of even smaller things.  You might not agree with quarks and leptons, but if they can back it up, then repeat the work in another super collider, and new things come from it, what do you gain by negating the work?  Those nuclear bombs that ended WWII (I know, they could've kept fighting hand to hand and eventually won too), were designed straight out of pure science, and as we saw later, repeated by the Russians and other countries with enough smart people.