Why not Math as a religion, dumb down complex problems, if it's wrong for the common Joe, it's okay cause he wouldn't understand it anyway.. not a good strategy.. I think if Science has a knowledge management problem, that should be addressed rather than dumbing down of things for public consumption.
I will point out that math discoveries don't have quite the same kinds of asterisks as the physical sciences.
Math is indeed a religion deep down, at least according to people like Hume, you have to "believe" in things like induction, you have to "believe" that natural numbers "don't end at some point" (for lack of a better word) or that two parallel lines don't finally meet, because who's there to watch them till the end of the world to say that they don't in fact meet? (Hume writes it down way better than I could ever do).
Thus, we come out on top, since we know what happens in all possible worlds.
Talking about "all possible worlds" is religious-talk (at least that's what Hume would say), afaik we only know of one world, talking about the "possibility" of other worlds is what established/institutional religions do.