Well....since you bring up hypocrites...
When scientists appeal to various unobservable entities- universal forces, grand symmetries, twice-differential functions as in mechanics, Calabi-Yau manifolds, ionic bonds, or quantum fields- the shovel is in plain sight, but what is about to be shoveled is nowhere to be seen. Why physicists should enjoy inferential advantages denied theologians is not explained. Berlinski, “Devil’s Delusion,” p. 143.
Again...Why physicists should enjoy inferential advantages denied theologians is not explained.
It may come as a shock to you but me and many of my colleagues do not accept the hypothesis of string theory because it is insubstantial.
I would also like to note that ionic bonds (electrostatic) are completely observable.
Now, I'm not saying that you are insignificant...
...but within the context of this thread, you are insignificant.
Berlinski has it right. The kerfuffle is due to folks such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Victor Stengler...
1. Richard Dawkins, in “The God Delusion,” makes no secret of his distain for those of faith, and contempt for theology. As in the case of many of our atheist scientists, they have hoped to discover laws of some final physical theory so powerful that they will explain the property of matter in all of its modes. “the most extreme hope for science,” Steven Weinberg has written, “is that we will be able to trace the explanation of all natural phenomena to final laws and historical accidents.”
2. Accidents? Well, some attempt to leave that to mathematics. MIT physicist Max Tegmark, physicist Edward Witten, and mathematician Alain Connes have written that the origins of creation are in some inexplicably austere and remote mathematical structure, one so powerful that from it space and time themselves may be derived.
a. Perhaps one should keep in mind that these ambitious speculations assign to mathematics a degree of agency that until now they don not seem to have possessed.
3. Dawkins, among others, has embraced the ‘multiverse,’ [the Landscape] idea, that there could be an infinite number of universes, each with some permutation of the natural laws of physics, vastly different from ours. Why, then, scruple at the Deity? After all, the theologian need only apply to a single God and a single universe. Dawkins must appeal to infinitely many universes crammed with laws of nature wriggling indiscreetly and fundamental physical parameters changing as one travels the cosmos. And- the entire gargantuan structure scientifically unobservable and devoid of any connection to expericnce.
4. Now, get this: Dawkins actually writes, “The key difference between the radically extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis, is one of statistical improbability.”
As Uncensored has indicated, scientist are often considered as infallible...and behave as the new 'priest-class,' yet are not subject to the same contumely.