Faith and good faith are different things. Good faith is the dual of trust: it is being sincere in communication and actions. It&#x27;s actually a weird term because &quot;faith&quot; is an extreme, uncritical form of trust while &quot;good faith&quot; is behavior that is worth trusting.<p>The trust that is essential to science is believing that someone else who attempts to reproduce your results and failed is sincerely trying to reproduce your results. Mistrust would be issues like rejecting someone&#x27;s results with accusations of fraud or incompetence.<p>The good faith that is essential to science is trying one&#x27;s best  to reproduce results and making one&#x27;s own experiments easily reproducible. An example of bad faith would be deliberately obfuscating sources of data.<p>Your example exemplifies trust and good faith: the materials scientist assumes the theoretical scientist is produced their study in good faith. If they have difficulties reproducing the results, they would try to communicate with the theoretical scientist and others in an attempt to clarify the discrepancy between their experiments. This cannot possibly work without mutual trust and good faith <i>in the act of doing science</i>.<p>In contrast, the way religious beliefs are developed and propagated is <i>not</i> usually rooted in trust and good faith. It can be when it is unhierarchical and rooted in personal experience, but in organized religion it is not. Religion is a hierarchy of authority on truth. Instead of trust, we have obedience. Instead of good faith, we have righteousness.<p>The first half of my comment was contrasting &quot;things i believe that i call scientific knowledge&quot; and &quot;the act of doing science&quot;. There are more distinctions I briefly alluded to: &quot;the social organization of science&quot;, &quot;the economic structure of science&quot;, &quot;ownership over scientific knowledge&quot;, etc. We can even have science about science, analyzing any of these particular facets. Many facets, but they come together as a whole. No one has a pure conception of science. All of these facets are inextricably related. I think it&#x27;s important to distinguish &quot;scientific beliefs&quot; and being &quot;scientific&quot;.<p>Lots of people claim to be rational, or scientific based on their beliefs. To me, this is clearly incomplete. It is easy to fool someone with dressings of scientific language or pantomimed motions that look like scientific actions. Good science is mixed up with &quot;bad&quot; science, which is a strange term because bad science is clearly not science by definition. One trap that i see people often fall into is feeling that their beliefs are rational&#x2F;scientific and meeting someone with conflicting ideas, then attributing &quot;irrationality&quot; or &quot;unscientific&quot; nature to that person. Maybe it&#x27;s a strawman that lives only in my head. I think it happens an awful lot. It&#x27;s happened to me, at least.