Tim, understanding takes effort. It seldom just falls in your lap. That's not something we're really good at. There will always be people who mislead through greed, self-aggrandizement, general dumbness, or just plain being mistaken. Science doesn't guarantee us The Truth. It just gives us a glimmer of hope for finding the way out of our mistakes.

Rev, I am not ungracious, but I don't have infinite patience either. I really only have one virtue - I can respect and admire people for what they are and not what I expect them to be. I admire the fact that you help other people and that you try to make the world a better place. I think there is a link between philosophy and ethics and science. They are immutably linked together - all I say is that THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING and the conclusions of the first two should not be given the same kind of weight as the conclusions of the other. They can all inform and to some extent guide each other, but they are not equivalent.

To put the scientific seal of approval on ethics is downright dangerous. (But that doesn't mean science can't tell us something about ethics or help us refine or understanding of them.)

You don't understand science very well and so you don't see any problem lumping everything together. One sign of a well-adjusted individual is how well they have assimilated their disparate pieces of knowledge into a coherent web of understanding: but part of that understanding needs to be that things that things that aren't even subject to scientific analysis don't get the scientific seal of approval.