The standard narrative of science as “the progressive disenchantment of the world,” often attributed to the chemist Max Planck, runs counter to the historical record. It is clear that for much of the scientific enterprise, there has always been a substantial support for superstition, myth, and supernaturalism, as evidenced by the extraordinary confluence of earlier scientific superstitions with later scientific rationales. Recent scientific observations and inventions, many of which form the foundations of modern life, also attest to the persistence of superstition in the scientific mindset. The rational response to this is not to abandon scientific practice and the progress it has made, but rather to treat it as an on-going historical rather than evolutionary project. In this context, it is important to underscore the fact that any convincing explanation of the natural world must be scientifically adequate, and hence immune to the critique of science as an evolutionary product. This, of course, entails restricting science to a single and rational discipline. In fact, this restriction is the condition of possibility of this historic process.
As the subject matter of science is the study of the natural world, it is only appropriate that the approach to this study be equally naturalistic. Since the time of Democritus, there has been a naturalist’s approach to science, which involves the identification and study of the fundamental natural phenomena. In the modern era, the fundamental phenomena of science were clearly established as matter, energy, space, and time. Their interpretation in terms of higher-level phenomena was an open and open-ended project. As it turned out, it became increasingly clear that phenomena like charge, mass, energy, and even motion were manifestations of the same fundamental phenomena. The phenomena of space and time, however, still pose a problem, and it is not clear that the different interpretations which have been put forth in the history of science represent an advance over the older views. One interesting feature of the classical understanding of space and time is the remarkable continuity it has maintained across time. The modern understanding of the space-time manifold is qualitatively different, but a modern understanding does not obviate the importance of the classical view.
It is only with the modern era that there has been a focus on quantification. This led to important developments such as the understanding of thermodynamics as a law, and the quantum theory of the interactions between the different phenomena. Nevertheless, the relationship between the conceptualization of nature in the modern era and the naturalistic philosophy of science is far from simple
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