It takes a lot of observing, thinking, and testing to arrive at a decent picture of what wasn't known before.
> Science is not the word of God
No, and that's a good thing. Scientific progress depends on revising knowledge as more facts accumulate and point in different directions. Until there's enough information to illuminate things well, there are a lot of questions, missteps, etc.
I would want the government, private institutions, and every individual to lean MORE on actual science than they ever have, and to understand its benefits AND limitations, because that is how the world learns and improves.
But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing. With issues like pandemics science is more nessisary because it is a specific and specialzed issue not many people understand well, yet it is directly impacting most of our lives.
But if you look at the Amish people for example, you can live your entire life knowing almost nothing about science live a have a happy, healthy and meaningful existence. Generalizing that example more we can see that successful flourishing human civilizations have existed for all of our history and all of the probably had less than a percent of the scientific knowledge we have today, yet we are suffering from mostly tge same issues: suicide, racism, sadness, disfunctional governments, power struggles, etc.
You say that science is illuminating but I fail to see where science has truly made any part of the human expience more enlightened.
> But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing.
I was illuminating the difference between the world around us being its complicated, partially unexplored self, and the GP saying that science is muddled and confusing, which it is, but to a lesser degree than the world it is developing from.
> you will largely find “science” has mislead humanity at most steps along the way
Your use of quotes there is the tell... many have purported to "know" "scientific" facts when their beliefs were nothing but beliefs. And most/many have been cast aside as our level of knowledge has progressed. And that is the true progress of science - learning more about the world and changing from guesses about reality to knowledge about reality.
People will always have their agendas and limitations, but the process of learning and understanding always surpasses each individuals' limitations and gives us better understanding. Even if it is "one funeral at a time".