I may have phrased my question poorly. As I recall, the previous thread had got to a point where there was back-and-forth about the wisdom of believing in things that can't be proven. Someone made the point that such reliance on accepting the unproven existed in science.
That was me; I argued then, and continue to argue now, that accepting things on faith, without evidence, is a mistake.
The argument that science accepts things that aren't proven is often made by those who favor believing in things on faith, but it isn't a good argument. There are axioms in mathematics that can't be proven formally (such as a thing is always equal to itself), but the body of human scientific knowledge does not rest on these axioms; it rests on observation. Any theory is only as good as the next bit of evidence that refutes it.
A scientist does not accept "the earth's gravity imparts an acceleration on an object equivalent to 9.8 meters per second squared" as an axiom; he goes out and measures it. Again and again and again and again. And then he refines his tools and increases the precision of his measurements, and measures it again.
The force of gravity is not math; the math describes the behavior of gravity. There's a difference. The animal that lives in my house is not a big black dog; "big" and "black" and "dog" are simply arbitrary sounds used to describe it, but it is an animal that exists without those words, so arguments about semantics do not change the reality of its existence any more than arguments about axioms in mathematics change the way that gravity behaves. Even in a different language, the pet in my house would be the same; even in a different mathematical system, gravity would act the same way. It's important not to confuse a thing with the model or language that we use to describe the thing. Attacks on axioms of a mathematical language do not mean that the universe's properties are based on things that can't be proved.
Faith is believing in something without evidence to support that belief. We have evidence to support the belief that gravity behaves in thus-and-such a way; we do not have evidence to believe that there is an invisible man who lives in the sky and spends a great deal of time thinking about what kind of clothes people should wear and how people should have sex.
One of the problems with accepting any belief without evidence is that you have no referent to decide whether or not that belief has any bearing on reality or not, as the world's thousands of religious faiths can demonstrate--they can not possibly all be right.
