Science, in and of itself, is an idea - a sort of philosophical construct. It is built upon the belief that the world operates in a consistent and systematic manner... 'rules' - which can be discovered through processes designed to analyze how one factor affects the outcome of a process within our world. If this is truly not the case, and the rules of our world are subject to change without our notice, then science and anything we consider to be reason has only a limited bearing on reality. However, it would be impossible to know what things are variable, and what things are fixed, without first testing for that which is consistent in the first place.
In this sense, this is the belief that God is logical and consistent. All people ultimately believe in God - a process which is responsible for creating the world around us. Exactly who that God is and why that God has constructed the universe is a matter of personal existential philosophy known as Spiritualism - but everyone has a God, even if it is only their desire for the world to have no meaning beyond what they can stitch together from chaos.
If one does not believe that God or God's world is consistent - then science is relatively pointless and one believes he lives in Harry Potter, where the whims of an author to express a thing over-rule any kind of logical consistency, conservation law, or purpose beyond the desire to express an idea considered 'neat.' To such people, the question is never why it rains or what process leads to the rain developing, it is why God has chosen to express rain on that given day, time, and area. The world doesn't need physical reason, it requires symbolic or emotional justification.
While I did deliver a bit of an underhand at Rowling, it serves as a rather practical distinction between a scientific mindset and a magical mindset. Little Witch Academia versus Harry Potter. One person requires a causal sequence of events or circumstances to describe the outcome, the other requires a social or philosophical symbol to embellish a statement into the existence of the outcome.
These views are not necessarily adversarial - it is simply which manner in which a person is willing to predominantly view their world. To someone who is more prone to seeing the magic of the world - the symbolic connection between events is sufficient evidence to them for causation. To someone who is more prone to seeing the science of the world - they are more prone to trying to repeat those phenomena in a bottle and isolate causal factors. Most people can see both - it is why fractals and 'magic ratios' are always very intriguing for people and certain things are magnetic in their appeal.
While Science, itself, is difficult to say it can ever become a religion - people can erect or consolidate into institutions dedicated to certain pursuits, philosophies, and ideas. Science would force us to re-evaluate our understanding of the world if we launched a satellite into polar orbit over the Sun and found it to be a toroid (or if, in a sort of epic troll fashion, it slammed into a newly deployed firmament - evoking the first question of whether or not anything need be consistent about our world and how science would deal with getting different results from the same experiment performed multiple times... every person who has studied quantum mechanics is now shifting anxiously). But our ability to explore the world is finite and not every factor can be easily isolated and tested.
This leads to ideas and opinions on what the available experimental evidence actually suggests, often contingent upon one's beliefs about the accuracy and relevance of the collected data to the proposed theory. This leads, invariably, to people extending their beliefs of what is going on beyond what is strictly proven by experiment. This is not necessarily a bad thing - engineers were using atom theory for steam engines and other such things well before atoms were proven to exist. It worked to describe what was going on and led to accurate predictions about the behavior of steam and chemical reactions. Not every theory needs to be proven beyond its functional applications. Our first theories that led to the construction of the transistor were way off - but they were accurate enough to get us that far, and we learned more in doing so.
It is when people become unwilling to learn new things beyond what they have learned to use, functionally, where it becomes more of a religious mindset than a scientific one. This process, too, is not always bad. People willing to be consistently critical of new ideas and theories, quick to temper the expectations and predictions of others, can be valuable in their own right. So long as scientists are able to freely hold these ideas and develop them on their own, this is no real issue.
When signs of 'group think' and censorship begin to emerge, however, this is when the mindset of scientists and free thinkers has been replaced with that of magicians and cultists. It is to be considered an ill omen.
