>I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated?
Yes, people are generally not hostile to science and understand it's a best-effort work-in-progress-type thing. The problem is that the Science Zealots haven't gotten this memo, and go around flashing "studies" in peoples' faces (often completely without specificity) like it justifies something. When they do this, people get defensive. The "rejection of science" is the rejection of science as inviolable truth, dogma, religion, not the rejection of the continuing enterprise of cooperative human improvement.
If someone says "I can't even speak to someone who is anti-vax/anti-climate change/anti-same-sex marriage/etc", this is religiously motivated bigotry.
The anti-vax thing isn't even a science issue, it's fearmongering based on nothing. The burden of proof is on the people claiming all these different kinds of vaccines have negative effects.
I don't know why the hell you brought up marriage.
You have a point about people getting zealous about climate change, but I think that's a response to people's horrific innate reaction of doubling down when faced with evidence against something they believe.
The Science-as-religion movement, which I personally call fundamentalist positivism, is doing more harm to science than a million creationists and anti-vaccinationinsts and faith healers could possibly do. It undermines science from within by performing a kind of deep epistemological bait and switch -- replacing scientific epistemology at the root with religious epistemology while leaving the layers above superficially unchanged. Destroy it with fire.
I've seen this a handful of times, where someone with legit science credentials will say something like "the lesson of science is" and then follow it up with an entirely philosophical conclusion. Like "... there is no purpose to the universe" (that comes from Dr. Jerry Coyne.) I'm not aware of any scientific experiment or framework to test the hypothesis that there is or isn't a purpose to the universe, nor even the possibility of creating such an experiment. But a fairly well renowned scientist made that claim -- essentially a philosophical-religious claim -- under the label of science.
I wouldn't say that does more harm to science than creationists etc. Instead, I'd say it contributes to the same mentality. It treats science as a label for a certain belief system, rather than a label for a set of processes and the data/explanations tied to those processes. As you say, it replaces scientific epistemology with religious epistemology -- stripping away the thing that makes science universal, and replacing it with something that makes it tribal.
Yes, people are generally not hostile to science and understand it's a best-effort work-in-progress-type thing. The problem is that the Science Zealots haven't gotten this memo, and go around flashing "studies" in peoples' faces (often completely without specificity) like it justifies something. When they do this, people get defensive. The "rejection of science" is the rejection of science as inviolable truth, dogma, religion, not the rejection of the continuing enterprise of cooperative human improvement.
If someone says "I can't even speak to someone who is anti-vax/anti-climate change/anti-same-sex marriage/etc", this is religiously motivated bigotry.