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RichardKennaway comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong
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You are taking particle physics for the totality of science throughout, cherry-picking a part of science most remote from everyday concerns, ignoring the rest of the elephant. We know the chemical elements, the methods of taking them from the ground, how to combine them in a million ways to produce the cornucopia of our everyday life. We know how plants grow and how to make them grow better. Because of that we build better buildings, make better roads, and grow better and more plants than our ancestors. We can talk to each other around the world in seconds and travel there in hours. Science! It works!
Who is indigenous, and what is the test of time? We are all indigenous to this planet, and for better or worse, the ones that people call "indigenous" are conspicuously not standing the test of time since encountering the ones that picked up the material ball and ran with it as fast as possible. Throughout history, the test of time has been the test of whether or not you got overrun by your neighbours. I'm not arguing that might makes right, but might certainly makes might.
That leaves out the fact the science works, and the more you do it, the more it works. It is not the slave to our passions, but the tool of our passion to make everything in our lives better, and we use it to the full. Science isn't cathedrals to particle physics, it's food on the table, houses to live in, and matter rearranged to our desire. Religion works only until everyone realizes there's no-one behind the curtain. The curtain hangs in tatters.
Perhaps I was not clear enough, but that wasn't my intention - far from it. I was trying to highlight the diversity of scientific inquiry, by choosing a few representative fields. The elephant has many, many parts to it, and some of them are distinctly less useful or likely to "work" than others. But note that you can't even talk about what's likely to "work" without adopting some normative standards first, as you implicitly did in your reply: and our general worldview, with its cosmology (what's out there? or - even more critically - what's important? What should we be paying attention to?) and morality ("what should we do?") is going to have a big impact on such choices, in any but the most crudely-technocratic or runaway-capitalist society.
These are not trivial issues - indeed, scientists of such caliber as Einstein and Oppenheimer were famously forced to grapple with these when they found out - much to their horror and dismay, if popular accounts are to be believed - that "science" had given them the ability to build catastrophically destructive weapons. And our own MIRI is often said to be facing similar concerns in its work on AI.
Whether "religion" is relevant here depends mostly on how you define the term. But AIUI, many scholars would argue that Confucianism qualifies as one, despite it being quite non-theistic, and more in the nature of a collection of moral maxims, and of course, a basic worldview highlighting such principles as cultivating basic kindness, showing loyalty and care where appropriate, and participating in rituals that foster a sense of unity and social harmony. Many people would argue that such a "religion" could be highly appropriate for our hyper-"material" world - whatever it is that we choose "material" to mean.
"Working" is as objective as it comes. Nobody wants to die of smallpox, and smallpox vaccination works, while prayers don't. Nobody wants to die at sea, so sailors have to know the tides, and how to determine where they are. No-one wants to starve, so farmers have to know how to make their crops thrive. They won't get that knowledge by praying for revelation. In short, people have purposes, and can observe whether what they are doing to achieve them is working. The better they can find out what works and what doesn't, the better they will achieve those purposes, whatever they are.
That is the pressure, objectively and insistently exerted by nature, to find things out. The carpenter making a better table has no need of God to tell him what sort of glue will give way and what will hold fast.
Confucianism is an interesting case, but I think it was sustained not by its own virtue but by the power of the centralised and authoritarian Chinese state, with which it was a good fit with its emphasis on loyalty and deference to superiors. The scientific revolution didn't happen there. So theocracy isn't the only thing that can stop science from happening.
As for a religion appropriate to the modern world, the traditions of the past are available to all in the Internet age. Anyone can pick and choose or make their own. But I see little future for mass religions based on fictions and unenforced by state power.