John...I'm really having a hard time with the idea of science being a belief. I much prefer Articulett's position of science being a default system that's willing to change it's outlook based on new information. I could use the word "authority" as a substitute for belief...or the word "woo" but my way of thinking wants to keep woo for the more outrageous claims.
...snip...
If we take that same wall, and alter one it's temperature, science tells me that if possible I should be able to get it cold enough ( 0K ) that all atomic motion will cease, the sub-atomic particles will collapse in on themselves, the wall's volume will become effectively zero ( unsure about it's mass ) allowing me to effectively pass through.
Would that serve as an example of science as a belief? here I am, thinking science has cut me enough slack to allow me an interpretation that I can indeed walk through walls using only scientific ideas.
It doesn't matter, Stout, if you don't see it the way I do, but since you asked again what I mean, I'll try to explain again. If we start from the primitive position of humanity looking at the world and wondering what it means, why am I here, what is that glowing ball moving overhead, the way I see it is that we have always come up with schemes, philosophies, pretty much guesses, as to the answers. When some observation doesn't fit, or someone has a better idea, the new ideas take over. This is a property of philosophy.
Now, at some point a bunch of people decided to formalise that process of theorisation, prediction, observation, interpretation, etc. into the scientific method. So the first thing to note is that science is a subset of philosophy. It is a way of investigating and also a set of deductions, conclusions, beliefs, or whatever you like to call them. And as science was formulated in that way, it took certain propositions as given, axiomatic (such as that there is nothing other than physical matter to be found, and that it will behave coherently).
Science, then, in my view, is a branch of philosophy, and other branches have different axioms. One, for example, is Creationism, which does not consider as true much of what science says, because it takes certain other basic axioms as more important, overriding all others. Thus, the ridiculous, but nevertheless
internally logical refutation of evolution despite the whole of the fossil record, by coming up with reasons why the fossil record appears to show evolution - like "God put it all there to test our faith".
Now, that is the way I think of it - philosophy has different branches with different
fundamental ways of thinking about the world. Science is just one such. I then recognise that while science is extremely good at discovering certain kinds of relationship between physical events, it is not true to say that it can reinvent its philosophical basis to suit new data, because it does not concern itself to study certain things that are outside its remit. This has changed to some degree (for instance, in deciding that psychology and other soft sciences could be studied(, and it may at some time extend its view to look at a wider field. However, psychology had to be studied as a physical science by looking only at behaviour at first. Eventually there have been attempts to study more subjectively and qualitatively in psychology, which is slackening the hard edges of science (or, some would say, simply making this kind of psychology more an art, or 'woo' even).
So your examples of things that science says are not quite the point, although in practice I suppose this is how the philosophy and its limits are played out. It is just difficult to find examples that might point to the difference between science as self-correcting 'authority' and science as belief system. The idea of changing paradigms (or changing theories, if PM is to be believed) gives some idea. Was the Newtonian view an authority or a belief? Is our current view any different? Now, of course, you can say that whatever stage it is at, it is still open to being reviewed, and the discovery of Relativity proves that. I am happy with scientists tentatively saying that their view is such a fluid position and will be, or may well be, revolutionised, but what happens time and time again is that the current paradigm is trusted and becomes authoritative. Furthermore, the fundamental axioms are not challenged.
Beyond this, you might like to question whether the unique form of a human being - our place in evolution, our size, our cultural norms - might influence the way we look at the world in almost invisible (to us) ways. The idea of "the laws of physics" (related to the
belief that matter will behave the same in all circumstances throughout the universe) could be seen as reflecting our human nature and culture. The more we bother to look at the assumptions behind our scientific materialist view, the more, I believe, we discover, and the more anthropomorphic and fixated they appear.
I have to admit that I say this as an amateur who reads about science and not someone who spends all day deep in the mathematics of the cosmos, but I also think that the latter position can lead to tunnel vision.
Some examples: we seem to have the idea that monism is correct (the assumption being that there couldn't be two utterly distinct kinds of condition in the universe, such as matter and mind, or that somehow all such dualities or multiplicities must arise from one single kind of 'thing'). However, we are happy to talk about matter (or rather energy-matter) arising in space-time, so we already have a duality, the first appearing to warp the latter. Perhaps all the frantic work to find a unifying theory is to make energy-matter and space-time fit one mould, so to speak. Then, having reduced all complexity in the universe to one single stuff, and perhaps found one single law, science will have done its job, although it will presumably have no idea why the universe originated as it did, or what other universes might exist.
I also find it odd that dualism is considered so unacceptable philosophically as a basis for the universe. Of course, woo-paranoics will immediately conclude that I'm a dualist and saying that the universe is made up of Matter and Mind, the old Earth and Sky mythic madness, but that's their fruitcake. Interestingly, since energy-matter is considered in relation to space-time, have we progressed that far from Earth and Sky?
I don't pretend to understand QM, but hardly anyone does, I'm told. The point is that when you get the drift of how oddly things behave at that level in relation to a) human-scale normality and b) human-scale scientific normality, it helps to shake up the assumptions from where they've been hiding. No instantaneous communication, we were being told on this thread earlier, but it seems that certain particles behave that way.
Again, admitting my relative ignorance of the depths of the strange mathematical art called science, I find it quite funny that the solution of scientific materialism for the longstanding problem of gravity - how does matter attract other matter across apparent void? - is that it must be mediated by a particle. Gravity, mediated by matter. Right. Would that be a particle with no mass, perhaps? Can matter have no mass, I wonder? What is the definition of matter, for that matter?
that they have ALL the answers, no matter if those answers are materialistic or composed by immaterial souls. 
You are painfully ignorant. I rest my case. You are woo in wolf clothes.