Alfred North Whitehead in "Science and Modern World," discusses in great detail something similar (though I'd describe it as something more than cult, given science's institutional development and general recognition), in the sense of Science being in the Prophetic tradition. Science has discarded metaphysics, or philosophy, but yet it retains its own unspoken premises and frames of reference as any philosophy and religion does. All of which which go uninspected because in discarding metaphysics it also threw away the very tool used to address these questions.
One premise without rational basis, for example, is separation of mind/spirit and matter. Another is that you can know something by knowing its parts, or reductionism.
The Whiteheadean theologian John Cobb sees that all prophetic religions as being involved in a secularization of the world by placing God outside of it and only having access through the mediation of a particular revelation. Science is not transcendence of this, says Cobb, but its full realization.
Cobb writes: "Modernity arose through a process of secularization. This was in part a continuation of the prophetic tradition within Christianity. In this tradition God is sharply distinguished from the world and the way things are. God's transcendence is emphasized. God judges the world. God's will calls for the transformation of the world. Thus the world as it is is not sacred. It is the creation of God but not itself divine. Human beings are free to explore it and to use it."
This secularization of nature and the series of prophets that promoted it historically probably originates with the rise of agriculture and cities, which brought with them a different relationship between humans and the planet. For pre-urban societies nature was seen as the Deity incarnate, because it fed and clothed people and sustained people without significant intervention. Early anthropologists named this relationship of humans with the world "animism" because most non-urban peoples prior to European expansion and colonization across world perceived everything animated by and taking form the Deity: the soil, trees, water, animals and plants. Agricultural societies of Middle East and Central Asia, as well as Central America, in contrast plowed up the natural ecosystems to plant their crops, and nature started to become capricious, unforgiving and even hostile. God, like the land, started appearing as something distant, capricious and hostile, and required a mediation in the same manner that growing states and empires took a mediating role between populations and the land.
Once the world is treated as a secular thing, you can exploit it, which is why there is such a close relationship between the spread of the prophetic great religions and destruction of traditional societies and nature. I'd suggest this was something that was going on among all the early urban cultures that arose with domestication of plants and animals, and the rise of the city, of which the Hebrews were but one.