Technology

If you want, you can view science as a system of organization. A way of making sense of facts. If I give you a file of seemingly random ones and zeroes, it is useless. If I give you an algorithm to decode those ones and zeroes into a message, that has utility. However, somebody else could produce an algorithm to decode those same ones and zeroes into an entirely different message. So, which algorithm is correct? Neither.

But say I give you another file, and Algorithm B doesn't produce anything useful for this message, so now Algorithm A is more useful. But I also provide a new Algorithm C which also finds messages in both files. Now which is more correct, A or C? And on and on. We continue to refine our models of the data, and we hope that those models will have predictive utility until proven otherwise, but it is always possible (in fact, almost guaranteed) that there is a model of the universe that is more accurate than the one we have.

Consider the utility of a map. A map is an obviously useful thing, but it is also incomplete. A perfect map, a "true" map, would perfectly reproduce every single minute detail of the thing it is mapping. But to do so, it would need to be built at the same scale as the thing it is mapping, which would be far too cumbersome to actually use as, you know, a map. So, we abstract details to identify patterns to maximize utility. Science, likewise, is a tool of prediction, which is useful, but is also not true, because our model of the universe can never be complete.

If all it takes to make science truth is to provide quotes of famous people calling it truth, then religion is probably truth a thousand times over.

A lot of the arguments and evidence you bring to the table are circular and only true from the reference point of whatever internal logic you've decided to assemble for yourself. Does this mean you're surrounded by Chinese shills? Probably not, but that is also apparently the truth you've decided to believe in, evidence be damned.

What people are trying to make you see is that epistemologically, absolute truth is a ridiculous bar that, if you set as the hurdle for science to meet, is only going to disappoint you time and again.

Scientific knowledge does not have any special status or truth value conferred on it beyond the very educated guesswork of scientists and the time and effort and money that goes into verification. It's an endeavour that relies entirely on empiricism and the flaws that come with having limited human perceptions.

Does this mean that science is exactly the same as religion when it comes to reliability? Of course not, because the things that you choose to believe in when you believe in science are different, more accurate and reproducible.

To claim that science has some ineffable attribute that puts it above any other belief, on the other hand, is discounting and discrediting the effort and very nature of scientific knowledge, and ascribing to it the kind of mystic quality that is exactly what makes religious knowledge so ridiculous.

This is really strange in two ways.

One, you're not describing science but existence. Science is nothing if not a framework of knowledge based on the scientific method. To somehow come up with a definition of science that separates it from the scientific method actually removes all qualities of knowledge from science (do you think religious people also don't define their knowledge as "what is"?) On the whole, basing your definition of "Science" as how laymen define science seems to be a strange way to try to make a supposedly mathematical argument - from imprecision and abstraction?

Two, to conflate Science with existence essentially is concocting a truism - like when someone asks you to solve for x you've chosen to define x as whatever you want then solve it. Science as the sum of empirical human knowledge is an approximation of x, and as a mathematician I'm sure you understand the significance of how an approximation of something is a world apart from the thing itself. You cannot say that science is truth, therefore science is true - that is a pointless statement that completely drops all the reasons why science is more truthful than religious knowledge or any other form of knowledge.

"If the story of Adam and Eve wasn't true and correct, then there wouldn't be any humans."

You have a very binary understanding of what is necessary for something to be true that is almost dogmatic.

The rules of chemistry need not be true and correct for formulas to succeed. People were doing correct things for the wrong reasons, even scientifically, for centuries, if not millennia. Think about things like surgeons not washing hands, inefficient gunpowder, bloodletting, or the attempts at a unified theory of Physics - we know that not everything is correct, yet the formulas don't fail at small enough scales/slow enough scales/within certain observational parameters.

You're right that science aims for truth, but that doesn't mean it can attain anything more than our closest approximation of the truth (limited by human perspectives and resources). We believe in it because it is what works, for now. And the beauty of this is that if one day some incontrovertible proof for a higher being does come up, we will recalibrate all our theories to account for it (presumably after very, very stringent checks.)

Now if your whole point is Science has done very many good things all around us, that is 100% true! But that says nothing about the truth value of Science, beyond that there is a lot of evidence of it working that one time (which is not what you seem to be claiming when you say it exists regardless of belief).

I hope OP is young and is learning that the harder he tries to look 'brilliant and impressive' with this kind of stuff, the more it's going to backfire. If OP not young, they should probably seek psychological counseling.

Belief is just what you personally think is true, there is no universal concept of true, even things that the majority of people believe to be true are not necessarily universally agreed upon. Even something as basic as 1 + 1 == 2 might not be believed by some people. There is no accepted universal arbiter of truth. When people say they believe in science they mean that they recognize the scientific process as the best way we have found to determine what is true in our reality.

Take as an example that the Earth is an approximate sphere. Most people agree that this is true and therefore believe this. But there also exist people who do not believe this, that argue it is not true. They do not believe it. What is true is not agreed upon. These people have a fundamentally different perception of reality. Those that believe in science trust in the systems and methods of the scientific process and therefore when such systems tell us that the Earth is in fact a slightly flattened spheroid we accept that as a truth. That is what it means to believe in science.

We can take your axiom, 1+1 = 2, and break it down into where fundamentally one of your biggest misunderstandings is.

We came up with the equivalence of 1+1=2, and deemed it true. Someone else in this comment section already brought up the idea of axioms, and while 1+1=2 is a theorem rather than an axiom, it is built on axioms that have been defined as fact for the rest of the framework to stand.

Science (and Math) is a purely anthropic system or framework. 1+1=2 isn't a universal constant if we look at the fusion of two Hydrogen atoms into one Helium atom (with extra energy being released!) The very idea of what 1 is can change depending on your reference point and may not stay the same between observers. While 1+1 may stay the same in the world of pure Mathematics (and a very robust world it is we have created!) it is much harder to apply them to real life (does this make Mathematics "true-er" than reality?)

If you run into an asshole, you just had bad luck. If everyone you run into is an asshole, the problem is you.