>Many religious proclamations actually are made up whole cloth by religious leaders. Take Joseph Smith, for instance. When someone invents their own religion, it is called a cult in the beginning, but that pejorative eventually goes away after the founder dies and the organization evolves and achieves more mainstream success.
It's funny you mention Joseph Smith because he disproves your case. Whether someone believes his claims or not, he offered something to substantiate them: a lengthy, coherent book with a reasonably-consistent internal narrative that claims to underpin his theological innovations.
Same is true of L. Ron Hubbard; Scientology is a thing that has gathered a following and continued on solely because he provided something substantial to anchor it against.
Thousands of rambling fringe religionists have come and gone since Joseph Smith and they fizzled out precisely because they had nothing significant to undergird their claims. The small followings these people gather out are held together by force of personality, and as soon as they're gone or diminished in the group's eyes, the group dissolves.
>However, it isn’t terribly important whether religious proclamations come freshly made up from a single person or if they are evolved from legends and handed down from earlier generations. What’s important is their epistemological foundation. “God says so” seems to be the sum of it. The evidence? Emotional reasoning and appeals to just having faith.
To the layman, the evidence for either is the equally convincing. Compare Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Joe Q. Public truly has no idea if the claims of a scientific paper have a valid epistemological foundation. One must undergo many years of training to become a subject matter expert and provide a serious or credible critique/endorsement of such works.
Until that point, the reader is at the mercy of his credibility heuristics to determine which subject-matter experts appear to know what they're talking about.
Serious religious works function the same way. The average member of the public cannot go into something like the Book of Mormon and make an extensive critique of it, weigh its archaeological consistency against similar theological documents, etc., just like they can't go through a scientific work and validate that the scientist sampled his/her data wisely, chose the appropriate calculations, accurately summarized the data, and so on.
If you have the dense tome for people to gloss over and use to make their own connections, it becomes 100% about projecting an image of trustworthiness and believability.
You can say "Well they can see my science works", but then, the religionist could also say "well they can see my religion works", and then it's all about impression/perception. For example, one could perform a magic trick and claim to have invented a hat-based rabbit replicator. Provided you had enough bunnies and interactivity to fool the senses, this would be highly persuasive unless there happened to be someone who was competent to get into the mechanics of it. "Seeing", or thinking you're seeing, is believing.
People are, in fact, much more excited to experiment and engage with religious content because it addresses an area of their lives that they feel is much more important and accessible (their personal/emotional/familial well-being).
Religion and science are much nearer to each other than you think. Their separation is fairly recent; before the last few centuries, it was typically religious institutions driving innovation, understanding, and discovery.
Religion and science both must be accepted based on trust heuristics (called "faith" in religious contexts) by everyone who is not an expert in the specific speciality, which means that everyone is relying on these 99% of the time, since one can only be expert in a small portion of subjects.
Because acceptance of these principles operate identically, you can hijack either group by using the same method: produce a tome that is surface-plausible, and then change things to match the trust heuristics most commonly deployed throughout the group. This will require some changes in framing and vocabulary, but not in the fundamentals.