I've seen this a handful of times, where someone with legit science credentials will say something like "the lesson of science is" and then follow it up with an

I've seen this a handful of times, where someone with legit science credentials will say something like "the lesson of science is" and then follow it up with an entirely philosophical conclusion. Like "... there is no purpose to the universe" (that comes from Dr. Jerry Coyne.) I'm not aware of any scientific experiment or framework to test the hypothesis that there is or isn't a purpose to the universe, nor even the possibility of creating such an experiment. But a fairly well renowned scientist made that claim -- essentially a philosophical-religious claim -- under the label of science. I wouldn't say that does more harm to science than creationists etc. Instead, I'd say it contributes to the same mentality. It treats science as a label for a certain belief system, rather than a label for a set of processes and the data/explanations tied to those processes. As you say, it replaces scientific epistemology with religious epistemology -- stripping away the thing that makes science universal, and replacing it with something that makes it tribal.