What is truth? Who the fuck knows. As an evolutionary biologist that is not what I want to find out. Strange huh? Are scientists not searching for objective truth? No, because we, as a species, are utterly unable to find it. Our senses are limited, our reach is limited, and we can never rule out that in the next few moments the entire universe turns into cheese cake. What we as scientists want to find is empirical truth, trying to create models and theories that best explain our observations. I also admit that we make assumptions in doing so (for example “physical reality doesn’t spontaneously change and turn everything into cheese cake”), but if these were challenged we would try to adapt our theories and models to it.
The thing is, our explanations and models and theories may be flawed, are certainly not “true reality” etc, but they have value. They allow us to get a better, if somewhat indirect and imperfect understanding of our universe that can then be used for further analysis. That this works is already obvious considering that we have used science to develop technologies and medicine that are mostly reliable (which we wouldn’t expect if we were too far off) and in the fact that science makes testable predictions that often have turned out to be true (for example the orbit of Mercury, which both Newtonian mechanics and General relativity predicted to be a certain way, with GR turning out to be “more correct”). If science is wrong, the error usually manifests itself quickly and causes us to change our models and theories accordingly, but that usually means that previous theories are not entirely invalidated, often it turns out that they are just special cases of the newer theories (Newtonian mechanics for example being a special case of GR). And so our theories often have merit even after they have been “falsified”.
Religion makes truth statements without them being testable. That’s fine as long as it doesn’t contradict blatantly obvious observations. After all, a god MIGHT exist. The supernatural is not part of science since it obviously goes beyond our ability to test and measure. Scientists usually don’t make any statements about it whatsoever. The “worst” science can say about religion is that there are thousands of different, contradicting religious and supernatural truth statements, and that this means that stochastically speaking, it is unlikely for any one of them (and in fact any of them in general) to be the ACTUAL truth.
If you say “Listen to God” I can say without any logical problem “Which one? How?”. Truth statements without evidence have to be believed. If I don’t believe, there is no further merit to them, that is the problem with morality based on authoritarian, supernatural sources. Ultimately, what you are describing here OP is your fear of your own believed worldview to be wrong, nothing more.
Humanity has always lived as specks of dust, yet most of our beliefs center around us being special, chosen people by God/Gods/other supernatural enities who ultimately are the most important beings in the universe. Some of us fear not being given special treatment and others (sometimes rightfully) can’t help but hope that there is something out there taking care of them in an otherwise often hostile world. I get that. But ultimately I think that the scientific removal of humanity from its self-placed pedestal of being the center of the universe will help us find the humanity in each other, make us come closer together, since we are all that we have. This is not something to despair over. The universe is vast and most likely utterly indifferent towards us. But you could also see us as the part of the universe which DOES care. And science as our method to find out at least somewhat more about us, rather than insisting on already knowing everything.
In conclusion: “Why should I listen to you?” “How do you know what you are saying is true?” Those are important questions, but you yourself are trying to special plead yourself out of them by stating that God is exempt from them and that you know all there is to know about his will. That’s at best highly arrogant and presumptuous. I know that what we scientists say is not “This is the truth” but “This theory has been tested a lot and explains our observations best”. And that certainly is more worthy of listening to.
