"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."   - Moynihan.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  - Sagan

First, thank you for trying to elevate the level of discussion on this site. Science -- the result of following the scientific method -- is one of humanity's greatest inventions. Based on observation and reason, nothing can get us closer to the truth. It is not perfect, it is not beyond debate, and it is certainly not immutable. People (some more than others) want perfect, unchanging, absolute answers and tend to be put off by the provisional nature of science. If a scientific conclusion isn't eternally true, what good is it? It's just a guess, right? No better than any other guess?

A conclusion reached by the scientific method is far better than just a guess. Anyone who is curious can scrutinize the design of an experiment or examine the data or do the maths -- or even repeat the experiment or observation. If the logic is sound, it's good science even if a better experiment eventually supplants it. We only know what we know at any time. New information is always finding its way to us. That gets incorporated into the body of knowledge, we learn something, and good ideas are superseded by better ideas every day.

Debating the conclusion of a paper is one thing; disagreeing over facts is quite another. Today, we can build safe bubbles around ourselves, letting in only affirming factoids. We can convince ourselves that drone sightings are a harbinger of an impending extraterrestrial contact. Or, that dodgy data are proof of a buried city 6500 feet below a pyramid. How can people believe such extraordinary things, with such flimsy evidence? It is amazing what people will accept (or reject) as facts. Critical thinking requires effort, but is well worth fostering from an early age.

This thread asks us to "believe in science," but I think that is wrong. Science earns our confidence, not our faith. We trust the method because it works. Opinions come and go; that's part of the process. There's almost always a consensus in the sciences. That's not anti-scientific at all. There are so many specialties that no individual scientist can possible master them all. So, there is trust that those most expert in a field will know which arguments carry the most weight. Again, consensus will change as new information percolates through the system. This willingness to change is not a weakness in science, but one of its greatest strengths.

These threads expose a fault line with, generally, evangelicals on one side and everyone else on the other. The same posters cast doubt on science (which doesn't always give them the answers they want), with talk about "real science," politics, control, and "follow the money." Fair enough, but this cuts both ways. Anyone who has evidence that will overturn orthodoxy is encouraged to publish. Over time, we only recall the names of those scientists who took knowledge in new directions. There is plenty of funding available for that.