Inventing 'science' and 'scientists' as a reaction against the chaos of modernization

The mid-nineteenth century invented that most paradoxical and yet key figure of Modernity : the dynamically active full-time experimentalist called "the scientist" , intent on proving that the world is both statically knowable and statically controllable.

This invention , still damaging our world , was an unconscious reaction against the early side effects of modernization.

Victorian era modernization cum industrialization cum globalization was busy demonstrating to all that the world, now that all of it was daily at our doorstep, was far more dynamic and far more uncontrollable that hitherto believed.

Lost Protestantism , found Scientism

Many people , who used to believe in religion involving a superior being controlling the world simply because it calmed their nightmares about a chaotic world, no longer believed that a superior being existed.

They still had their blind faith however, unsupported by visible facts, in an invisible controllable world lying just beneath our visibly chaotic world.

But now they (or their new delegate - the scientist) would have to control it in place of God.

It is quite possible , however , to read the same Bible as these chaos-fearing folk and see a God who quite enjoys all the infinite variety that our kaleidoscopic universe provides : a God in fact with an inordinate fondness for 50,000 varieties of beetles.

So far, nothing in religion or science has suggested that our world, at its base , has to be simple and predictable.

The world of human psychology , though , does suggest many reasons why so many people insist, against all known facts, that a simple orderly predictable world simply must exist.

And I suppose one way to deal humanely with people with such mental difficulties is to recruit them into theoretical physics and put their phobia to work.

Some of the accidental by-products of their search for certainty have proven quite useful to rest of us ....