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Your confusing science with scientists. While scientists can be biased, angry, and political, their theories won't stand if they publish without the evidence. It's the group phenomenon of debate, experimentation and observation that weeds out the individual biases of scientists and teases out the gems.

It's the group phenomenon of debate, experimentation and observation that weeds out the individual biases of scientists and teases out the gems.

Very good point. It's like the theory that a collection of people can act in a way far more intelligent than any single one of them.

That's how the Pajamahadeen busted Dan Rather. Buckhead proposed that the letters were fake, and then one person after another took after them on many different tracks. The bad leads were quickly rejected, and in the end Dan lost his job.

I can see how science is similar. Many leads are tried, and dead ends quickly detected, so that the scientific community can accomplish what no single scientist can.

You have a great deal of faith(!) that scientists are somehow immune from their own prejudices in interpreting data. Willing self-deception is not bred out of a person simply because they get an advanced degree.

True, Objective review of the facts is the kicker. It is also true that objectivity, ESPECIALLY when it comes to metaphysical concepts and the "footprints" the metaphysical may leave in the physical universe, is much rarer than one would assume. Let me give you an example: Francis Crick made headlines a few years ago with his adoption (along with Hoyle and a few others) in publicly proclaiming his belief in panspermia. There was a big writeup about it in PUNCH magazine (the London equivalent of the New Yorker). His reasoning was that the evolutionary model of naturalism was simply mathematically impossible. As wild as the belief sounds that life on earth came from "outer space" Crick claimed "it is the only reasonable hypothesis. Darwinism is tired and played out and simply doesn't fit, and the other alternative, that of special creation, is clearly fantastic." No prejudice there, mind you.