Not that modern science requires hard evidence to reach conclusions, because it scorns them. Rapidly succeeding theories provide all the momentum needed to propel it forward. Back in 1887 the Catholic biologist Antoine Béchamp (rival of Pasteur and probably the real discoverer of DNA) complained, We are always making assumptions, and from assumption to assumption, we end by concluding without proof.

https://www.ldolphin.org/geocentricity/Hertz.pdf

Not that modern science requires hard evidence to reach conclusions, because it scorns them. Rapidly succeeding theories provide all the momentum needed to propel it forward. Back in 1887 the Catholic biologist Antoine Béchamp (rival of Pasteur and probably the real discoverer of DNA) complained, 

We are always making assumptions, and from assumption to assumption, we end by concluding without proof. 

Leaping from one working hypothesis to the next, science today is not concerned with objective truth as such. If the relative proves serviceable, who needs absolutes? Whatever works for the time being is true for the time being, and what other time is there? Once up and down were reduced to a manner of speaking, everything else became relative. In the twentieth century this gigantic heresy would be formulated into dogma as the Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein, one of the great heresiarchs of the natural order in the line of Galileo, Newton and Darwin. Needless to say, there were enormous repercussions in the moral order as well, for the mechanisms of "situational science" served "situational ethics" equally well. Truth itself became relative. An increasingly subjective, perpetually shifting quasi-reality was substituted for the old certainties of daily life and accepted as normal by common consensus. Men accustomed to lifting their eyes to God and praying, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," no longer knew or cared where either area might be located in reality, for everything lost its place in the new phenomenology.