I trust science, but I don't trust scientists. I believe in all verified findings, but not necesserily the conclusions drawn from them.
If a man holds a rock in your face and says "This rock keeps albino polar bears away, because the rock is here and albino polar bears are not," would you believe him? He has drawn a cause-effect relationship, after all.
Yes, it's a silly and extreme example. But in real life, the possibile conclusions that can be made from a new finding are often very similarly, but subtly, woven into the discovery, as if the fact and opinion are both a single fact.
I also believe in practiced science, but do not give the same credibility to historical science.
This particular distinction is, I think, one that the media abuses when it uses the umbrella term 'science' to indicate that all sciences are as solid in their proofs as mathematics itself. (In fact, when compared to the field of mathematics, we find that the phrase "scientifically proven" is an oxymoron!)
Practised science is the type of science you did at school- waving your hand through a bunsen burner flame, that kind of thing. All the bits were in front of you, and you controlled them. You were not guessing anything- you saw it happen, and could list everything that was and was not affecting the experiments you did.
Historical science is where findings of old items are used as the basis of educated guesses. The variables are not in front of the scientists making the conclusions, or certainly not in the same form that they were when the action was taking place. There are no controlled conditions. For this reason, historicial artefacts should not be held to be 'proofs' of an idea in the same league as practised science or mathematics. A better phrase might be that they 'support' an idea. But to be honest, they can usually support several ideas.
Lastly, why does science seems to be pitted against religion so often? Science only measures physical matter. Science does not measure love, or emotion, very well. The amount to which it could be said to measure these at all is only possible because the sources of these things (humans) are possible to control, and therefore also to observe under controlled conditions.
But if something was not only non-physical, but also not contained by anything physical, and in fact had a will of it's own (we're talking spiritual, here) then science can't handle it. Science is too small. Anyone claiming that science disproves the existence of God might as well say that a blind man has disproved the existence of light.
But despite the researchers that we can't trust, the reporters who abuse it, and its built-in limits, science is still clearly a tool that can be used for so much good, and therefore a blessing.
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