Science is the process of iteratively replacing models with slightly more accurate models - it's important to note that they are models, however. And it is important to note that all of them are - right and wrong are not the right words, but first, the model is not the same thing as the thing that is being modeled, and second, models don't predict anything perfectly accurately. "This is not a pipe" is a criticism once raised of art, that is equally valid raised of language, and indeed science, itself. The word pipe is not a pipe. An explanation is always relative to a (possibly implicit) model.
There is no such thing as an "atom". An "Atom" is our way of thinking about a phenomenon; the referent for the word always points at what we think the word represents, not anything in reality. The word means indivisible; we didn't "discover that we could split the atom", we discovered there's no such thing as the atom-as-we-then-conceived-of-it, and there was an entirely different phenomenon which we merely used the same name for. There was one model; now there's another.
And there's a LOT of sleight of hand in the sciences with this kind of thing; where we pretend that the people arguing for an atom were just arguing for the phenomena that the atom ends up doing a pretty good job of describing. No. The original people arguing for the atom were arguing for a bedrock scale; a scale below which there wasn't anything smaller.
(They were fundamentally and deeply wrong - but their model was actually pretty good for predicting behavior anyways. That's it's own topic, and it is one other authors have dealt with more thoroughly than I will: Map-territory relation)
A similar sleight-of-hand takes place with the word "science" itself.
In science, anyone can participate; I can sit down and start digging through data; I can start creating my own data, and analyzing that. I've done both of those things. A problem arises with the very large set of people who do not participate. Most people talking about science, either for or against it, have done neither of those things.
And most arguments come down to "You should sit down and listen to what my smart people say, instead of listening to what the stupid people you think are smart are saying." Most people who argue with flat-earth people have no personal evidence that the Earth is not flat; they are just insisting that somebody listen to -their- smart people. And they call this "science".
They are more accurate, not because of any intrinsic benefit of a scientific outlook - because they don't practice anything like that - but rather because they have chosen the right group of people to take the word of. And even then, not because of any intrinsic merit on their part, but because other people have carefully constructed the world to lead them to those people to listen to.
And there is nothing constraining the people who construct the world to lead people to particular conclusions, to construct the world to lead them to the -right- conclusion. We saw that with Soviet sciences. The forces that make people believe in a round Earth, could easily be applied to make them believe in a flat Earth, if it served those who constructed the systems in question to do so.
If I don't know why the Earth is round - or more specifically, why the science says the Earth is round - what good does the fact that the Earth is actually round do my beliefs? I lack an objective truth sensor. If it turned out tomorrow that the Earth actually is flat - that we have been lied to our entire lives, and somebody put us in a plane, flew us to the edge of the world, and showed us the tortoise the world is sitting on top of - how would we go about convincing the world that this is the case?
You can't just convince the world that everything it knows is false. Now realize that there are multiple "worlds", with their own network of ideas, beliefs, wise men, self-reinforcing evidence structures. If you grew up with "science" as your world - if you grew up with that network of ideas, beliefs, wise men (scientists), and self-reinforcing evidence structures - then sure, all of this sounds great. The wise men are always right, they follow the ritual (science) correctly, and get the right results; we should listen to them, and we can follow the ritual ourselves, and get the same results, because that's what the ritual does. That's how the world works, right?
Now, this is very important: Science is different. Belief in science is not. Belief in science looks like every other belief out there.
And scientists talking about science are rarely so up-front about that, either. To pick a current political item, did Dr Fauci, when he was saying people shouldn't wear masks because they weren't effective, preface it by saying how often science is wrong? Now that he's saying masks are effective (which he claims to have secretly believed all along), is he prefacing that? When the pro-maskers were anti-science, because science is what the FDA, CDC, and WHO says it is, was anybody cautious about the nature of science then? How about now, when it is the anti-maskers who are anti-science?
"Science" and science are two very, very different things. Science the process is fucking fantastic; it's literally the best idea humanity has ever had. Science the institution - the academia, the officials, the coalitions of experts, the consensus, the journals - all of that is fucking cancer. Science the institution is a religion. No, it isn't different. No, it isn't special. It's a religion. A belief structure. And it strangles the very thing it is built upon.
Just because a scientists says something, doesn't mean the evidence supports it. The only evidence this actually represents, if you are honest with yourself, is "My wise man said this." The only evidence you have for any beliefs based on what scientists tell you is the same evidence anybody ever has for the words of a wise man - how helpful/accurate the words that wise man says are. And when people lose faith in science, because science keeps being wrong - that's because they're accurately updating their information about the wise men. Insisting the wise men are right, when they keep being wrong? That's religious dogma, isn't it?
There's a critical support structure, that lets science the institution get some of the accuracy-discovering benefits of science-the-process. It is that the institution is incentivized to be correct, because status in the institution is determined by being correct, and - and this bit is the load-bearing bit - anyone can point out that somebody is incorrect.
The very idea of "anti-science" is the most anti-science thing I have ever encountered. It is synonymous with "heretic", and it has kicked the load-bearing support right out from underneath science, as an institution. Science, as an institution, is nothing more than another group of wise men, without that support structure.
