The purist science...this side of Heaven : fabricating the scientific canopy

As a Christian may I quickly say that I prefer my atheists to lose all of their religion, not just some of it.
Replacing a transcendental God with human gods cum masters of the universe cum lords of the human kind , is to combine the worst aspects of religion and atheism, with all the good bits of both left out.

When scientific discoveries (made out in the field by dirt-on-the-hands science) destroyed what Peter Berger calls the sacred canopy for most people in the western world , theoretically oriented scientists (natural philosophy indoor types rather than the dirt-on-hands natural history types) set about erecting a scientific canopy in its place.

This immediately set up an internecine war within science.

Because, after all , hands-on science had just discovered about how complex, dynamic and intermingled Reality really was, and this was the direct and immediate reason for the decline in the public belief in a simple, predictable, stable cosmos set up by a clockmaker God.

So to immediately claim, without proof , that a few fundamental laws in fundamental physics had been more than enough to create our simple, predictable, stable cosmos together with all human culture, might be thought to take a great deal of chutzpah on the part of the theory boys.

But such is the basic human need to believe that Life and Reality are simple and orderly and purpose-driven , it must be said that the theory boys had all the initial innings.

That is , until 1945 or thereabouts....

WWII : pure science collides with impure reality

If anyone learned the key science lesson of WWII, it wasn't the adults of the day.

Rather that science lesson was partially absorbed by children born in 1938 and afterwards , children too young to share the glow most in the Allied world felt about the supposed leading role science played in defeating the Axis.

I say partially because wartime science was generally blamed by these young people only for deliberately  promising and then succeeding in killing as many people as it possibly could possible , particularly killing as many civilians as possible.

When its actual biggest scientific and moral failures were for what it promised both sides during the war but then didn't deliver.

Sins of omission rather than sins of commission.

So bad efficient science merely replaces good efficient science in the baby-boomer academics' eyes, when a more accurate and devastating charge is to say pure science was, and is always, overwhelming inefficient.

As it must be, as long as it continues to deny that reality is inevitably and invariably dirty , mixed , intermingled and impure.....