Science will save us!
The sheep, without a shepherd, wandering in the wilderness.
You thought the ancient teachings were no longer relevant. That we were beyond slavery. We survived the holocaust. Six million had perished, and we had flourished. If we could survive that, we could survive anything. In addition, we bred our offspring to embrace the brave cry of "Never again!". And in our pride, we abandoned the old ways, and embraced the new.
Science would save us. We could see into the furthest reaches of the universe, and imagine things unimaginable. We had opened the very womb of nature, and could mess with her offspring. We were like gods - of so we thought. Forgetting that this "reality" that we live in was here long before any of us were even a thought, and will be around long after we have been forgotten for many aeons.
Yes, my children, let us not acknowledge that their might - nay there has to be - a Creator of some nature. Somehow all this that we live and experience fell into place, and we are the conscious result of that. And you can convince yourself that it is an "accident" of .... nature - a nature that is itself a product of this very creation that we are exploring.
Empirical Science
We cannot use empirical science to investigate non-empirical realms.
To rely on purely empirical science would require a denial of anything or any event that is not empirical. Or to accept a philosophical/theological view that we would be able to empirically determine the principles upon which the complexity of the universe is built.
Already, in entering the imaginary world of the quantum, we have left the empirical nature of science, and entered a world in which we are designing the eyes with which we look at the mysterious world of the infinitesimally small, and, the infinitely large, our cosmos.
There we will, like Alice peering down the rabbit hole, see the reflection of our ancestors, those that looked into the same pool, using other tools, human tools, rather than the highly complex engineering and high power demands of our current methods of investigation. Not that theirs was less complex, or required less effort—like the difference between acoustic music and electric music.
Fear
We have to acknowledge the 4th dimension - the realm of the imaginary - and begin to working very consciously with it. Just as science is doing. It has been proven beyond any shadow of doubt that the imaginary influences the real (and vice-versa). There is a large part of mathematics, and of science itself, that relies on the mathematics of the imaginary. Wherein it acknowledges that everything real has an imaginary component.
It has become an existential battle between the magic of spirit versus the magic of science. It is NOT a battle between magic and science. To use the trite, but oft-quoted, statement that any science, sufficiently advanced, would seem like magic to many who first experience it. To those who have dedicated their lives to the practice and deep study of magic have often used, what might be described, as scientific approaches to their explorations. There are also numerous accounts of prejudice and human traits affecting the outcome of an experiment.
Nor is it a battle between the rational and the irrational - for any rationality that incorporates the description of a reality broader, longer or deeper than the currently accepted reality will be deemed irrational.
Rational
Similarly, rationality would also fall into the category of a belief system, but one that has a serious flaw. It requires a “closed system”, one in which there is an optimum or ideal state from which to judge and interpret the state of the world that conforms (or not) to this ideal, rational state. This is always based on a set of criteria that deems something rational (or non-rational). However, what if the base criteria were inadequate, or the rational evaluation brought us to a place of “irrationality”, a self-contradictory postion? This is not so absurd as it might seem, as might be seen regarding the contradictory nature of quantum physics – which is derived from the reason of pure science.
A very simple example of this is in geometry. If I have a equilateral triangle that has two sides of length 1, what is the third side’s length? Well, as we know from the Pythagorean equation, it has length , which itself is called an irrational number.
As "instant gratification"
Science is an expression of “instant gratification”. A “scientific” fact is the prize in this process. It could be described as a game of points, scored by scientifically proven facts, and any others are not allowed to be included in the game .
This is one of the reasons that mathematics stands apart – for it seeks only its own certainty, and is a language that is purely narcissistic and, essentially, self contained. It seeks only mathematical facts, whether existentially correct, or not. Through its disregard for what is real, it has become the premier tool in empirical science.
Thus it hovers between “fact” and “fiction – just as we as humans experience our existences, a mixture of fact and fiction, truth and story, reality and narrative. Of course, the fiction is just as much a driver as is fact in many of our endeavours to describe and find balance in the world we live in – through our religion and our philosophy, our stories and myths, history, romance, discoveries and explorations.
Scientific truth is limited to the context – and thus language and culture – in which it is framed. For instance, a physical law might not apply in non-physical situations, like psychology or economics – though there is no scientific fact that is not expressed in mathematical truths. (is there?) because math is the yardstick by which all such facts are now judged – you could even call it the blade that each fact is threshed upon – whether overtly or covertly.
Thus our science has now reached the level of religious fervour, for its rationalistic, excluded middle way of describing our world has become the de facto standard for most cultures.