Gary
I like your stories about religious and scientific stories and paradoxes
and would find it hard to disagree. I am more struck, however, by the way
that science / scientific method looks more like a deparadoxifing strategy
in the context you set it. There are a couple of important differences
betten scientific and non scientific paradigms though, that show why we
privilege scientific depapradoxifing strategies to other ones.
Firstly, where as religion / superstition reduces uncertainty by
emphasising a singular truth, science creates uncertainty. Thus the dark
matter puzzle is created by, among others, the Copernicus paradox
resolutions that you describe. By learning we grasp the extent of our
ignorance, and find more paradoxes to cope with. Even if we don't know what
to do, we can probably cope better than someone who doesn't know that they
don't know.
Secondly, scientific knowledge often has the property that it can be shown
to be wrong, and corrected. Unfortunately, this does not happen very often
(as you observe), I think Kuhn says that it's because individual scientists
rarely change their minds, but funding bodies do and new scientists will
follow the prevailing logic and money.
Thirdly, non science is often happy to admit that humans cannot resolve
some paradoxes (we may be too dumb) but scientists often have too much
faith in scientific method to admit this possibility.
All good wishes
Steven