One of the key things that gets lost in this that the piece tends to assume that unscientific beliefs are somehow bad and we'd be better off without them. I am

One of the key things that gets lost in this that the piece tends to assume that unscientific beliefs are somehow bad and we'd be better off without them. I am not convinced that's the case. There are two reasons I think so. The first is that, as P. W. Anderson pointed out in his essay "More is Different" (published in Science magazine in 1972) reductionism doesn't work. With added complexity comes fundamentally new patterns. Just as chemistry is not just applied physics and biology is not just applied chemistry, I don't think life is just applied science and the real epistemological limits to what science can tell us are very real barriers. Heisenberg does a great job of mapping out these problems in his look at the history of scientific thought ("Physics and Philosophy"). When you look at verbomotor cultures and how they look a the world, their ideas of magic and religion aren't really filling the same roles as science today (see Ong, Walter "Orality and Literacy" and Eliade, Mircea, "Myth and Reality" See also Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process" and Grimes ed., Ronald "Readings in Ritual Studies"). Instead, in a culture based on spoken discourse instead of writing, everything is based on re-usable patterns that can be flexibly applied. This is something greatly missing in religious thought today. The mystery of a story is not whether it happened in the past but rather how it happens today. From this perspective a story like the Fall from Eden isn't so much about the origins of sin as it is the model of leaving one's parents' house, getting married, having kids, and becoming an adult. I think these sorts of patterns are likely deeply ingrained in us and it's better for us to accept and use it than fight it in the quest to conform to science. For example, in the article, you have the idea that people naturally think of heat as a substance. This works fine for many applications. One can think of heat exchangers as not being fundamentally different than the system of oxygen exchange in the body or vice versa. They do work the same way on a metaphorical level and these metaphors as Heisenberg shows (again "Physics and Philosophy") are also at the core of the formation of scientific theories. I therefore wonder if we'd have any scientific progress if our scientists had no unscientific beliefs. Additionally you have issues with the quest to be more scientific often eating the tail of, well, science. For example, it is worth noting that countries in Western Europe who use midwives as the routine primary care for childbirth have better outcomes than Western European countries that do not. Yet there is a fear that by doing this in, say, the US, we will be backing away from our commitment to science. Why is following emperical data seen this way though? Is it that we really worship technology in the guise of science?