The trouble is, even Science has bencome a religion. Just look at the history of science books, they have the greatest of difficulty in recognising:
1. that science existed before Newton
2. that Newton wrote twice as much on esotericism as on physics
3. that the founding fathers of modern science were almost to a man Masonic, bound together by a proto-religion recognising a divine ergos.

And you get exactly the same tactics used by the Churches from them:
1. Anti-heretical discrediting
2. The full Shakespearean panoply of disinformation extendin to outright lies, to a degree which should if their own rules of debate were accurately observed, discredit them through every trick of fallacious logic.

The simple fact is that the base of agricultural science was in place by 1300, and metallurgy by 1500. Cosmology has a direct line of dewscent from 1400. And much of that earlier thinking was somewhat guided by religion, into the bargain, which is why the Royal Society isn't prepared to go there.

The problem is, how much noise is in the scientific machine? I know, for example, that between 1968, when I stopped chemistry in secondary school, and 1975, when I had to restart it as an ancilliary subject studying management in a scientific university, the entire structure of the periodic table was recast, and some fundamental axioms I was taught as certain then were replaced by others which are very different yet apparently every whit as certain.

Let's look at the Higgs Boson as an example. The only evident case for spending a pharaonic sum of money on the Large Hadron Collider is that there seems to be a gap in the table, that it looks "right" that there "should" be something there. Or perhaps there just is a gap? The periodic table demonstrates the real atomic world isn't nice and square, the lanthanides and actinies all occupy the space just one element in each instance would normally fill if it were all neat and tidy. It is now starting to look as if in a very similar way, the model was wrong, that we not only have a Higgs Boson, but a whole crew of Higgs particles, from Powder-Boy to Admiral. So much for the use of religious arguments to justify science, then, and for science as an objective argument in and of itself alone.

Which rather demolishes the Dork's purist arguments, methinks. Where's Savonarolo when we need him?