Another popular viewpoint is that atheists worship science. And frankly, it’s not hard to find atheists, agnostics and others who revere science as the main tool that humanity's used in crawling up from primitive superstition to trustworthy truths.
But you’ll never see even the most starry-eyed non-theists pray and do knee-bends to astronomy or botany. If they enter laboratories or other cathedrals of science, they go there for hard-headed work, not to perform holy rituals in an awestruck hush.
The difference between trusting in science and practicing a religion is that religion is usually based on faithfully accepting revelations, commandments and other teachings as God’s holy men delivered them. But science is based on examining facts and squeezing them through the toughest tests possible to find new truths about them. Religious leaders say that anyone who doesn’t believe in their ideas is supposed to believe in them. Scientists say that anyone who doesn’t believe in scientific ideas is welcome to try disproving them. (Well, most scientists say it. Some scientists are too conceited or insecure to handle arguments.)
Or, to use another distinction, science tries to discover how the universe works; religion tells why the universe exists.
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