I’ve said this before; I hereby repeat myself.
Eliezer Yudkowsky on his blog Less Wrong wrote (in 2007),
Probably an actual majority of the people who believe in evolution use the phrase “because of evolution” because they want to be part of the scientific in-crowd—belief as scientific attire, like wearing a lab coat. . . . Its only purpose, for them, is to identify with a tribe.
Of course, one of the functions of religion IS to delineate, consolidate, and perpetuate a tribe. (As an aside, what was unique about Christianity was that early on it became—as far as I know, which admittedly is not very far—the first predominantly multicultural, multiethnic tribe, united, and later divided, by ideas.) True believers in capital-S Science associate with and even marry fellow atheists and “skeptics.” Many actual small-s scientists are much more eclectic.
Speaking of religion, I had a notion of Eliezer Yudkowsky as the John the Baptist of the AI Singularity, a.k.a. “the Rapture of the Nerds.” Maybe I was confusing him with Ray Kurzweil. If Yudkowsky ever was that prophet (notably, he disowns his own pre-2002 thinking), he is now more of a meta-theologian. He did opine, also in 2007, that there’s nothing wrong with the scientific quest for immortality in principle, and healthy superlongevity in practice. If life is good, what’s better? More life! My point is that many people now believe (not hypothesize, like actual scientists) that science holds the power, in principle, get us there—to a heaven on earth—and that the older conception of a supernatural Heaven was an expression of impotence.
A Cold Eye 
My comment was:
Much deeper than attire, it’s folk religion. “Science” is to our time what the One Church Catholic and Universal was to the fourteenth century — the source of cosmology, explainer of existence, consoler for mortality, generator of culture. The people you cite are analogous to those buying saints’ amulets, genuflecting in church on Sundays, hanging a cross over their bed, reflexively repeating the prayers. They do not have the profound understanding of the “theologians” — the scientists. (How many peasants do you think could explain transubstantiation?) In fact, they have all kinds of wild and superstitious misunderstandings.