Mind you, dark energy is complete hypothesis, and coming out of the scientific community should not give it any more validity than any other intangible, albeit deeply held, spiritual belief. Scientific theory as spiritual belief? Yes, I think it depends on how far you take it.

If you take the scientific pursuit far enough, especially down the quantum physics path, you find yourself in an existential pool with a lot of spiritual questions rubbing against your legs as you try to stay afloat. Walking down a spiritual path, if you ignore science, i.e. observation of the natural world, then maybe your faith is bigger than your Bible, whatever bible you use.

Science is spot on accurate when applied to the directly observable natural world. With the indirectly observable world, the odds are still in its favor because of the method, but there's a lot more room for error. And then with corporate tampering or academic politics in the form of financing and prestige, there's even more room for error.

But theoretical science is where faith comes in. Early astronomers arguably weren't always making direct observations. They were watching abstract points of light in the sky and trying to deduce what natural forces were at play. They weren't directly observing the forces. And believing them wasn't a matter of necessarily being able to make tests and predictions. There was a certain element of faith involved. You can review the findings, recreate the observations, but in the end you can disbelieve the resulting theory.

And every few hundred years, the entire formulation of the cosmos had to be destroyed and re-worked! So even when talking science, "science" needs to be qualified. Newton has survived, but he had to be amended by Einstein. Einstein is holding up pretty well, but then we have that little problem with quantum mechanics.

In 300 hundred years, maybe all of this will go out the door again, maybe our rock solid faith in our theories based on indirect observation will have to be amended. Maybe religion should learn something from the flexibility of science.