This lecture addresses the central question of our Science, Religion, and the Human Experience series—how may we understand science and religion as arising from, yet somehow transcending, the human experience?—by focusing on their important role as epistemic and moral authorities. Authority is a pivotal ingredient in discussions and debates related to science and religion, as major attention has been placed on apparent conflicts regarding their authoritative pronouncements on topics ranging from the origin of the universe or life to the morality of stem cell research. For some people, the implication is that either religion or science (usually not both) should be rejected as an authority; for others wishing to preserve the authoritative roles of science and religion, the task is to either to harmonize their pronouncements, or to segregate them such that each maintains authority in its own appropriate realm. In many of these accounts, however, the very nature of authority remains unexamined. As one important commonality, both science and religion generally ground their claims to authority on some erasure of their inescapable humanness: science and religion become mere fingers pointing directly to reality and God. Yet this erasure ignores everything we know about the history, philosophy, and politics of science and of religion. How, then, shall we treat science and religion with the authoritative respect they deserve, while fully acknowledging their human face? I will consider this problem in the context of an empirical study I have recently completed concerning trust placed by Americans in science and religion alongside nature and the state as major domains of authority. Results suggest that trust in authority is an important and unavoidable feature of modern life given its complexity, yet point to the imperative to blend commitment and critique in the ways we trust science, religion, and other authorities to provide guidance in our lives.