Your true fear is that they are wrong (just like the contemporary authorities have been wrong about major things throughout history, like heliocentrism and hand-washing). Because if they are, then we don't know as much as we think we do, and we aren't as powerful as we'd like to be, and we really are helplessly spinning through the universe on this tiny blue ball. It's too much to handle, so we close our eyes and cover our ears and hope that the people in the lab coats are right this time. But in the end, they're still human beings, just like the rest of us, just like the robed figures of old.

For some things we have a process now that helps us discover truth about tangible things. But since we don't have a control planet, we abstract that problem to man-made oracles (i.e. black-box models), which is not much better than ancients who sacrificed to the rain gods--it might even be worse, because we think the models are accurate, whereas no one today would believe in rain gods.