One irony here is that Sagan's comment about a believer's "deep-seated need to believe" applies to any believer - including a believer in the dominance, superiority, or supremacy of "science." You can't tell them anything, either.

There's also a fundamental epistemological flaw in statements like "...the set of physical laws that govern the universe." The so-called "laws" of physics are not the reason why a rock falls when you push it over a cliff. They do not cause that to happen. They are merely sophisticated descriptions of what happens, within a specific and most often tightly constrained conceptual framework. And not so useful, or downright dangerous, when misused. Mistaking descriptions of behavior for causes of behavior has great potential for causing trouble.

As Gregory Bateson pointed out, if you kick a rock, physics can do a pretty good job of describing what happens. If you kick a dog, physics is mostly useless for describing what happens.