"ThEy AlL rEqUiRe FaItH"

It's a gross misunderstanding or intentional misrepresentation.

Sure. To be clear, I’m an engineer and an atheist so I don’t mean it to attack either Athiesm or science by any means.

To start with, we cannot get true knowledge of the world outside ourselves by sensory perception alone. Rather, the way we interpret our sensory inputs is by applying it to some metaphysical framework of how we believe the outside world works.

As a small example, Descartes famously brought up analogy of a melting candle. A totally naive person being born into existence would see melted wax and hardened wax as two different substances. Sensory perception alone would lie to this person. Only by interpreting it through this metaphysical framework do we come to the conclusion that melted wax and hardened wax are the same thing at different temperatures.

This extends to deeper concepts that we can’t directly explain by our experience alone. At some point we stop using our own direct experience and expand our metaphysical framework using something else.

The thing that springs from that “something else” is religion, and in many instances it doesn’t necessarily encompass a concept of divinity or worship. In abrahamic religions it is the Judeo-Christian god. In Daoism it’s the belief in the Dao, an unexplainable force tied to the events of the natural world. In science it’s belief in the scientific method’s ability to produce objective truth with sufficient cooperation and experimentation. They’re all models of the outside world that stem from something beyond a single individuals sensory perception.

Science? It's a tool for measuring things... it is about as much of a religion as a ruler

It’s not, it’s a system that seeks to understand our world at a deeper level and predict future events.

It’s funny you mention that, though, because it brings up one of the difficulties in science. Measurements we base our scientific theories on rely on instruments, most of which themselves rely on other theories for reliable operation and interpretation of data.

One philosopher of science famously brought up the analogy of a surveyor who doesn’t understand magnetism. He attempts to use a compass as a surveying tool near some hidden source of magnetic field. Without understanding of the underlying principles of magnetism and local magnetic field, he would assume the compass unfailingly points north and the resulting measurements of the local geography would be wrong. Those flawed measurements might then be used by geologists, leading to the development of theories supported by flawed data.

There is always a degree of uncertainty in the instruments we use to develop and test our hypotheses because there is no such thing as certain knowledge in science. However, at some point we simply put faith in the scientific method and presume that our underlying theories are sufficiently accurate for our purposes and proceed accordingly.