Science in the form we have come to know it entered the seventeenth-century West as a new way of knowing, one that promised to augment our power and proceeded to deliver on that promise dramatically. The power it delivered has proved to be over nature only; it has not increased our power over ourselves (to become better people), or over our superiors (angels or God, let us say). How could it have? Power in an inclusive sense can be wielded only over one’s inferiors or at most one’s equals.

At the time, though–I use this phrase to cover the last three centuries–we did not see this clearly. We did not see that the scientific method has limitations built into it: It is restricted in principle to telling us about a part of reality only, that part (to repeat) that is beneath us in freedom and awareness. Instead, we thought we had discovered an improved way of knowing what was applicable across the board–a searchlight which in time might reach into every corner of the universe. The failure to notice that limitations are built into the very structure of the scientific method–that its power derives from its narrowness in the way the effectiveness of a dental drill derives from the smallness of its point–continues. I have spoken of it in the past tense because it can now be shown conclusively (I would say) that the scientific method is inherently limited, but the contrary view remains very much with us; in our culture as a whole it is probably still the reigning orthodoxy. On the very day I that I write these lines, for example, I come across Lévi-Strauss saying that “only through science…can…we…increase…the number and quality of the answers we are able to give.”

The spiritual decline of the last three hundred years–the eclipse of God sloping into the death of God with the correlative decline in our sense of transcendence and the sacred–is a direct consequence of this mistake. We made the mistake because we did not see the connection between the scientific method and power. Or rather, we saw only half of that connection. It was obvious that science issues in power, that our power expands by virtue of it. What we did not see is that it also proceeds from power; specifically, from our power to devise controlled experiments. Scientific knowledge, pure or applied, emerges only in regions where scientists can control–that is, have power over–the materials they work with.

The upshot of the mistake I have cited is this: In mistaking a restricted means of knowing for one we assume to be not only unrestricted but the most reliable we have, we have come to place our trust in–take for “the real world”–what appears through this restricted viewfinder. And as only aspects of reality that are inferior to us can register in this viewfinder, these being (to repeat) the aspects that we can control, the West has lowered the ceiling on its worldview, forcing us to live in an cramped, inferior world: Michael Horner calls it dis-spirited, Lewis Mumford, dis-qualified. With a single sweep of the methodological pen, one devised to write our own ticket and get our own way, our world has been stripped of the very possibility of housing things worthier than ourselves, things that exceed us in freedom, intelligence, and purpose. The consequences are severe. Causation is upward only, from the less to the more. Value proceeds in the face of enormous odds, for evolution–the only creative agency science allows–is prodigal.

– Huston Smith, from the preface to Meister Eckhart, Vol 2

(cdm | ScienceAndPower)