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Originally Posted by Dave  For some people it does indeed approach something of a religious conviction.... |
I think humans are rather prone to convictions of this sort. It is thus rather important that there is a structure - like, say, the scientific method - by which convictions can be challenged and overturned.
As an aside, some religious people go in for "scholarship", by which I mean they rely on trawls through past sayings to justify and explain things, rather in the way a lawyer looks for past cases to support their attempts to win their current case. While scientists do look through the literature, they are also obliged by the scientific method to open their eyes to the real world and test the literature against reality, rather than the other way around. (I'm sure this is also true of many religious people, by the way. And I'm aware that humans, being flawed, don't always do what they're obliged to.)