Science is a method, not a doctrine… Although there ARE doctrines on the method.

Theists, agnostics, and atheists alike tend to equivocate the "practice of science" with "scientific knowledge."  And "scientific knowledge" is often equivocated by those ignorant of science, with "unwavering assertion of truth," and thus dogmatic.  They say things like "science doesn't have all the answers." Well how can a method for discovering answers already have all the answers? It isn't supposed to have all the answers, it is supposed to be discovering answers. Science simply cannot expound conclusions about the world and then look for facts to support them. It looks at facts and attempts to draw conclusions from the questions those facts reveal about the world (even "fact" is taken quite humbly as "generally a close agreement by competent observers who make a series of observations about the same phenomenon" – Paul G. Hewitt).


Science works by observing closely the physical world around us. It then questions those observations, and poses hypothetical answers which might resolve the puzzle at hand. Science then predicts the consequences of those hypotheses, and tests said predictions. Only after all of this do we draw conclusions and formulate in the simplest terms a theory of explanation. That theory is then open to testing, criticism, and the evaluation of its explanatory power. Does it have the power to make predictions and expand our knowledge of how the world works? Does it explain better than competing theories? Is it logically sound?



However, some people do have a point when they say that "science also has its doctrine and dogma." But that doctrine and dogma, in the sense that they are biased and rarely questioned, is not found in the actual practice or current knowledge of science. The method and knowledge of science is always open to criticism. The doctrine and dogma in science is about the proper application of method, and which method we should use when approaching different branches of science, and how we should interpret scientific knowledge once we establish it. I don't really feel we can take this debate about interpretation and conclude that "science is just as dogmatic as religion."  


Arguments today, on the nature of scientific method and the interpretation of scientific knowledge, are a lively debate that remains open to criticism in the scientific community. And it doesn't affect the results of scientific practice, because those results must always meet a certain criteria before it has the weight of physical law. The key virtue of science is that it maintains a healthy degree of skepticism as the most essential means for digging deeper past the bull shit, until we eventually reach what is left… the truth. But we only assume we are pretty darn close to such truth. We never assume we have it absolutely unless we're arguing about mathematics and certain axioms of logic that appear to be universally undeniable (in both religion and science).