Belief in experts is itself sound scientific reasoning about the available evidence on experts. It’s like a chain of custody in legal evidence. If someone pres

Belief in experts is itself sound scientific reasoning about the available evidence on experts. It’s like a chain of custody in legal evidence. If someone presents evidence in court and states that there are logs, seals and timestamps proving the chain of custody and disproving tampering, it is not “an act of faith” to believe the evidence was preserved accurately, even though you only observe details about the chain of custody, not the state of the evidence itself at all times. It’s similar with expert opinion. You can think of the evidence (which you don’t personally observe) as passing through a series of chain of custody transactions - initial data collection, data preparation, actual study or research, proposed models, fact checking and testing correctness, presentation of results, use in an application / prototype / clinical trial, etc. Believing in the fidelity of this chain of events is itself amenable to scientific and inductive inquiry. Just like some rare case where police or attorneys lied about chain of custody with evidence that did get tampered with, sometimes this model of continuing trust at each step of the chain is wrong. Sometimes the chain of events that led to an expert opinion is untrustworthy - someone falsified data or lied, or there was an undetected error. But that means it is a statistical process with an error rate, not that it contains any aspect similar to faith.