> It really doesn’t seem religious to me.
Here's a personal opinion, hopefully clearly presented.
Scientists performing science use the scientific method to give humans the best available objective knowledge about the natural world. This aspect of science is not religious in nature and I think ~99% of HN would agree with this up to here.
What science cannot do is use data to make decisions. Science cannot perform risk-management and cost-benefit analysis. You can use scientific data to perform risk-management and make a decision, but there's no objective outcome to any decision. Science qua science cannot decide which course of action is the scientifically accurate one: that concept doesn't exist. This decision-making is the aspect of reality that has become religious in nature, and that has become wrongly conflated with science.
To illustrate that science is not the same thing as decision making, I'd point out that we've had plenty of occasions in real life where the American FDA and the European Medicines Agency have had different opinions on drug approvals with the same exact data. Who is following the science and who isn't following the science when they disagree on a drug approval? You can't answer that, because they both are using science, just making different decisions. Science and decision making are two different things, yet in today's world, they are often treated the same by some of the loudest and dumbest people.
People in today's world scream "Trust the science" as if that's the end to the argument if you disagree with their proposed solution to some problem like climate change or taking a medication. This belief in science is what takes the form of a religious belief. There is no science that can tell humans what the right course of action is to some problem. That's an entirely different thing, yet people shout down rational skeptics about something by saying things like "the science says we must do X" as if that concept is inarguable.
Intelligent, well-meaning, and rational people can agree with objective facts about climate change and still reasonably think that the economic devastation and human misery caused by trying to cut emissions as quickly as possible is not the best course of action to take.
> I know a few people who work in this area and they are just normal physical scientists.
For the most part, most humans working in this field are normal scientists doing normal science things, as best as possible.
However, it should be noted that scientists are also people, and the financial survival instinct for them exists.
Scientists are smart enough to understand the political zeitgeist and what butters their bread. Just like journalists have an incentive towards news that get the most clicks, scientists also have an incentive to veer towards research and conclusions that gets them the funding they need to live and work.