I'd never equate religion and science. I noted that religion arises from an innate desire to understand, and the flipside, anxiety at not knowing. Religion plays a lot to the dark side of that equation, not least by focusing on death, the ultimate unknowable, and providing happier alternatives to the thought of the void.

I think historical context is important. In the absence of better understanding, or any at all, myths about such things as creation and the afterlife--birth and death--at least provided the comfort of some answer, and scratch the primate brain's itch to know.

Just speculation, but that mechanism may have been beneficial, long ago. Unbounded primate curiosity might cause a person to not devote enough energy to practical questions of survival while pursuing cosmic questions, so maybe the easy answers papered over the gaps and freed up intellectual interest in more practical concerns. Evolution, with not a shred of irony, may have nudged us a bit toward religion.

I wouldn't be the first to note that science had to wait for a civilization capable of producing surpluses to support research without immediate payoff, and similarly, maybe general human intellectual development past the easy answers of religion had to await the surplus that produces the scientists that produces the better answers.

Which is to say that that was then, and this is now. Those easy answers that might have been functional 2,000 or 1,200 years ago are no longer functional. Nowadays they distract humans from the payoff that we're now in a position to receive from scientific thinking.

But another aspect of historical context important to consider is that knowledge and intellectual sophistication don't advance uniformly through a large population. And as a minor note, they often advance in different directions in different cultures, which I think is healthy, on balance.

Consider how the sophistication of pseudoscience has grown over time. (Yeah, I know it's a repugnant subject, but let's try for scientific objectivity here.) A century ago people only had to mumble "electricity" and "galvanic" this and "Roentgen rays" that to build psuedoscience sand castles that a lot of people swallowed. A half century later the bar was obviously higher, because it required positing flying saucers and visits from a whole taxonomy of alien species, and a supporting infrastructure of researchers and analyists and chroniclers and publicists.

Nowadays, to join the ranks, you have to demonstrate a superficial knowledge of science that would have passed for deep understanding a century ago. My old friends the Mars anomalists absorbed a lot of knowledge about image processing, and promptly misused it, but damn, could they talk a good game. They read up on geology and biology and bandied about technical terms with gay abandon, and in general demonstrated just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

But you can't deny that even they know more about Mars than Percival Lowell. Makes ya think, doesn't it?

In addition a perspective in time, I think a perspective about the spectrum of psuedoscientific attitudes is important. The Mars anomalists had a wide variety of mindsets, and at one end of the spectrum I found people who only needed a little encouragement to get serious and think rationally. I had most success infecting a few anomalists with my interest in serious image processing, and there's one in particular who got genuinely good enough at it to lend his assistance to the MER project as a volunteer image processor. Imagine that...an anomalist contributed to a major serious scientific project. Makes ya think, doesn't it?

To bring it back around to where I got started, with my comments about current scientific outreach and the innate hunger of a lot of people to participate in science and get their hands dirty...that's where anomalism and psuedoscience come from!!! If the scientific establishment refuses to help feed that hunger, it's not going to go away, it's going to turn elsewhere for satisfaction. Religions open their arms to such seekers, as do charlatans and quacks and Richard Hoagland and ayatollahs and imams.

You want to kill off psuedoscience once and for all? You won't get there by killing off people who think psuedoscientifically. You get there by inducting them into the club and teaching them The Way. A small number, steadily over time, generation by generation...it grows, it gets stronger.

Perhaps we need a "lay" organization or support system for science similar to what supports religion. Religion supports its relatively tiny number of professionals not (mostly) by just asking people to send money. It supports itself by creating congregations to join in the religious experience with them.

We need a Congregation of Science. So, if we want to talk about a "religion of science", I could be quite comfortable with that model. It works for religion because it works with human nature, and it welcomes humanity instead of trying to keep it at arms' length and treating it as a necessary evil about on a par with elimination.

The overall theme of this thread is whether science should change its attitude and "evangelize". I think it should; I think science needs to meet humanity halfway, and that just might be a "religion of science". The way to strengthen science isn't to beat up heretics, it's through expanding the membership base.

Embrace and conquer. It's the human way.