The universe is an ordered and rational place so that doing science makes sense; The underlying “laws of nature” governing the universe tend to be mathematical and are in a sense “beautiful”, and the question is why mathematical; The laws of nature are stable over time and are the same throughout the part of the universe that we can reach with our instruments; and Our minds are rational and we are capable of uncovering the laws of nature.
Clearly when we do science we make these assumptions but they cannot be proved to be true. Unfortunately in the “watering down” facts often get confused with personal speculations, especially with news media and science writers who inevitably have their own agendas. There is also a danger of extrapolating ideas from one branch of science into another without justification.
This has been done particularly with the biological theory of evolution that has sometimes been used as a complete explanation for everything rather than a claim about biology. In doing science we need to distinguish between the facts and the scientific theories developed to explain them, as sometimes these two ideas are confused. Roughly speaking, facts are what we can observe whereas a theory endeavors to explain what has been observed and why it is so.