God. Real. Right.

The original post about science is here. In that post, there are four sections, all requiring background and filling. The first one is setting:

this opinion is not Luddite. It’s neither anti-science nor anti-technology. Indeed, both science and technology are amazing results of the scientific-empirical or hypothetico-inductive method. The power and practicality of engineers and the acumen and creativity of scientists have changed the world and continue to provide societies which respect individualism with a functional advantage over the rest of the world.

The issue in this post is the one touting science’s strengths and benefits for culture. Once it is acceptable to use reason and nature rather than simply revelation in order to arrive at the “truth” about any particular issue, all bets are off on where the culture will go. In the West that transition took place over a period of about four hundred years, beginning somewhere around Averroes and Aquinas in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, maturing through Occam, and culminating in men like Bacon, Galileo, Newton, and Descartes in the Seventeenth Century.
People do not like change. To change even one significant element of a culture requires deep and persistent pressure over decades at the least. But the change brought about by the rise of science is both as deep and broad as the culture (or worldview, in this case) itself. There is no higher compliment to pay to science than to acknowledge that it has been powerful enough to lead an entire hemisphere and soon the rest of the world, with almost no kicking and screaming, into a worldview defined by its dominance. This dominance of science–its hegemony in culture–can be called scientism.
In this new worldview observation trumps theory. In the middle ages, who would care about observing a fallen world with fallen reason in order to learn about what would not persist anyway? During the enlightenment, who could trust faulty instruments to overrule universal laws of nature such as Newton’s? But by the Twentieth Century the only question is: who would adhere to any theory no matter how fundamental if not supported by practically all the observational data? Observation had become more fundamental than reason. The basis of the transition is simple. Observation deals with inescapable (for the moment) material realities. It is hard to pretend the grape and grapefruit hit the ground at different times when they don’t. (Suggested reading: Ian Barbour’s Science and Religion, originally called Religion in an Age of Science.)
Subjective theories give way to objective data. Of course data is also subjective in many ways, but it takes time to realize that fact. And objectivity as it is perceived at the time becomes the power to solve real problems. Before, when either revelation (originally) or reason (later) is still supreme, vested interest in certain interpretations and theories motivates the enhancement of supportive data and the diminishment of unsupportive, contrary (anomalous), or even contradictory data. Such enhancements and diminishments foster a toleration of material discomforts and problem-solving shortfalls in favor of the maintenance of comfortably traditional or ideologically non-threatening interpretations and theories. People will live with a headache if they believe caffeine is demonic. But when a person comes along who is not vested in the interpretation or theory, and that person eliminates a discomfort or solves a persistent problem (maybe even a problem people had not recognized as such until it was solved) then that person’s approach is itself revelatory and liberating.
In that new liberation, theory becomes only a tool of problem-solving, not an end in itself. For most people it means learning how to plug in a refrigerator and use it, rather than learning about Freon, electricity, compression, and thermal transfer. For scientists it means observing similar phenomena often enough that the results become predictable. Real causes are not at stake. Predictable function is. For instance, it does not matter whether gravity is little hooked particles called gravitons running from one body to the next pulling things together, or if it is a curvature in the “space-time fabric” (spoken with deep vibrato). All that matters is that objects are predictably affected by it and productive of it. To someone who is hungry it is much more important to know that an object will dependably relieve his hunger than to understand its chemistry. That sentence understates the significance of this distinction, though, because to a chemist it is also much more important to know that an element will act in a certain way than to understand whether the Bohr model of the atom is the metaphysical truth about atoms (which is not only unlikely because of known anomalies but also impossible because of the overall argument of this set of posts).
Regardless, since what gave science its power to change culture was culture’s receptiveness to its problem-solving ability, it is that power alone which gives rise to science as king of the hill in Western culture. Theorizing about things that “make no difference” is a waste of time in Western culture. And in Western culture, if it does not improve material conditions—solve material problems—it makes no difference. In fact, scientists who slip into what are perceived as esoteric disciplines (like cosmologists studying the origin of the universe) must either justify their work in terms of what problem of everyday life they might be able to solve or slip into the same kind of obscurity or disdain faced by non-scientists. Soon every discipline needs to become scientific—not because it is the best way to approach every issue, but because its practical, problem-solving power pushes aside the value of reason and revelation. The social sciences rise with Dewey under pragmatism. Even the study of the human soul (psyche) becomes a discipline designed to do nothing more than help people function from day to day (psychology). (My tone constantly reveals my bias, but my intention is simply to demonstrate that science has succeeded at what it does.)
So science’s power is that it can ignore metaphysical realities (in fact, cannot address them at all) and can instead focus on whatever works to solve a problem. Obviously then if an ideology commandeers science in a particular setting science will lose all of its advantages. An ideology will need science to give up the very thing which empowers it. If Soviet scientists need to demonstrate that refrigerated grain will produce cold-tolerant wheat plants, they will not be free to pursue what all their observations are already telling them about the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
So it is inevitably true that when the only imposed ideology is that of liberal individualism (simply respect of individual rights) science can flourish at what it actually does, solving material problems. But whenever that respect for individual liberty is compromised it is absolutely predictable that science will progressively wane in its success until it no longer serves its only purpose to the advantage of that society.
It will take another post—next upcoming in this series–to address the issue immediately coming out of this awareness, the moral value of technology.