The Scientific Reformation is Over

What now?

Image credit: Dennis Ariel

“Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I might see the foot of science on the necks of her enemies.”
Thomas Henry Huxley

Twenty years ago when I was a teenager, New Atheism was at its zenith. While to the evangelical churches I was brought up in a figure like Dawkins seemed to represent the fact that science vs religion was still a battle that remained alive, outside of church in the normal world of the 00s, the battle seemed to have long since been over, the only winner: science.

Very few then, only a few decades ago, would have doubted either the ideas or the principles of science, nor the voices of public scientists. In fact by this point a guiding belief had seeped into the pores of the secularising West: science tells us all we need to know about ourselves, about where we come from and what the universe is. The message from public scientists, in essence: we know all there is to know, and we’re just clearing up the last few details.

So it was that when physicist Lawrence Krauss published a book called A Universe from Nothing in 2012, he was content to use the rather bold subtitle Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, thus claiming to have applied the methods of physics to the…