You make good points. Skepticism is a core quality of being a scientist.

But people are remarkably good at erecting fences in their minds. Many of those brilliant people I refer to (I call them brilliant because of their past good work in science) were able to sort of build a fence in their mind around their work and let irrational beliefs take root around it. So they were not true scientists in all aspects of their lives.

Believing in God doesn't necessarily make you a bad scientist, either.