Yesterday someone posted something along the lines of
>Science requires you to trust experts in their field, so it's no different from religion
And anons replied something like
>Yeah that's all you can do OP, you're standing on the shoulders of giants bla bla
I just wanted to say that in my opinion this is very much not true: I'm an AI phd and depending on who my interlocutor is, I can easily explain anything from my field, computer science related, or even science related to different degrees of complexity: rather than trusting my opinion, one just needs to understand what I'm saying, and check whether that makes sense compared to everything they already know.
My point being, trust is not a problem with science itself, but rather with people who have not developed internal models sophisticated enough to understand it. To continue OP's metaphor, I don't think it's that far-fetched to claim that we're a little bit like priests, in that we understand the "scriptures" and people who are too engulfed by other rewards need to have "faith" in our readings.

There might not be a fix to this, as science as a decentralized institution literally took over the role religion had as the study of truth, but the amount of trusting done could be reduced by having some people create lightweight intuitions for folks who can't handle it. I believe this would also benefit science itself as judging from the previous post, most people tend to understand their field really well and not give a shit about others'.
To drive my point further, I'm not an AI phd I just wanted you to read the entire thing.