People love to say 'science is the new religion', 'scientists are the new priests', etc, but this betrays the fact that, according to our culture, science is NOT supposed to be like religion and scientists are not supposed to be priests. But why not?
What could have been more mundane than that the new cosmology would have simply been incorporated into our culture, replacing Medieval cosmology? Why, instead, did we concoct the idea of a 'scientific method' that opposes itself to 'religious dogma' and applies to all things?
The 'scientific method' and the supposed opposition between science and religion are a political invention that subordinates the scientific revolution and incorporates it into the dominant ideology of the modern world: liberalism.
The myth is familiar: Humanity was liberated and then, freed from the constraints of dogma, we created science. Science is subordinated to politics. Humanity's history becomes the history of our march towards liberal politics and its alleged 'freedom'.
Under this myth, the actual content of the scientific revolution - the new concepts and new discoveries - is unimportant. 'Science' becomes just another academic department, alongside the arts and humanities, employing its special method. All are subordinated to politics.
Religion is also now a 'way of seeing the world'. People fight over whether science and religion are compatible, but this fight is rather odd. They don't fight over whether, say, modern cosmology is compatible with a creator God, but over two 'ways of seeing'.
Is there one method for gaining knowledge about the world, two methods, many methods? Does the scientific method allow us to speak only of facts and the religious 'way of seeing' speak to morality? Etc. All completely irrelevant to what we actually know about the Universe.
Both science and religion (and everything else) have been completely subordinated to the political, to the story of humanity's political emancipation thanks to triumphant liberalism. This 'liberation' is the modern myth. The thing that sits are the core of our culture.
The scientific revolution produced a new account of the Universe. This is of obvious religious, moral, etc, significance and there's no reason to see it as somehow separate from such concerns, as belonging to a different 'domain' or another way of seeing the world.
We do not live in a culture that takes this new account of the Universe seriously. We live in a culture that rejects it. The way it rejects it is through the myth of the 'liberation of the mind from dogma'. In this way it can take what it finds useful and ignore the rest.
The natural sciences are connected by descent and not by a common method. Developments in astronomy led to developments in physics led to developments in chemistry, etc. Psychology, economics, etc, are not part of this. They are politics masquerading as science.
Indeed, to say that something is 'scientific' can only mean to say that it is compatible with the scientific account of the Universe, not that a particular method has been employed. This is no different from saying whether something conforms with doctrine.
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