Ghink of it as similar to learning how to field at third base: it's a skill, an art, not a science.
Connaître, not savoir.
The problem with science is illustrated in the old joke about the man looking for a coin he dropped one night. Someone comes up and sees him looking under the streetlight; after they both look for a time, the new person asks the guy, "Are you sure you dropped the coin here?"
"No, I dropped it down the street and around the corner."
"Then why aren't you looking over there?"
"Well, the light's better over here."
The metaphysical preconditions for science are "uniformity of causes in a closed system"; which after a period of time, for the intellectually lazy, is expressed as materialism. But it is very difficult to come up with what would be a rigorous test for materialism itself; the more so as the candidate for non-materialistic actor (God) is sentient and is able to make choices without respect to our controls.
("How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?")
Well, it's a difficult problem, so let's ignore it.
After a time this gets shortened to "there's no such thing as angels" and then "there never could have been any such thing as angels".
It's a subtle error, compounded by something akin to what Owen Barfield called "ancient unities" : human thought itself, including the words and categories, has changed over time -- to the point that things which we regard as self-evidently distinct were in fact not differentiated at all. "Why is the sky blue?" can be explained by "Because God thought it was pretty and he was right" or by reference to energy-dependent scattering cross sections of visible light by a nitrogen-oxygen mixture of gases subject to density and temperature gradients. The confusion comes over different meanings of the word "Why?" : the one being *purpose* and the other *mechanism*. And the ancients didn't have much of a concept of a model as we understand it, still less of empirical testing, controls, and the like; the two forms of "why" overlapped.
Along with the development of empiricism as an adjunct to, then a rival, then a supplanter of scholasticism (it was not limited to theology or cosmology; and the tendency to rely on authority still lingers on today in medicine!), was a concentration on *power* : magic was in fact a rival to technology, and was abandoned not because "we knew better" but because it was lacking in comparative efficacy.
Which brings us back to connaître and savoir: science is the discipline of learning how to predict in order to make use of, or to control; it is not concerned with ultimate causes in the first place; nor again with morals. (Read any economics textbook on utility functions to see the amorality dripping off of the pages.) But just because these items do not impinge on the model, is not sufficient grounds to conclude, let alone to declare ex cathedra that they do not exist, still less that science has "disproven" them.
For more reading on this, try Galileo's Daughter or C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image; Lewis has brief forays in some of his novels into the competition of science and the magical arts at the beginning of the Renaissance. (You know, he was a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Oxford and then Cambridge; and if, as so many atheists do, you sneer at his simplicity, try reading his Allegory of Love to discover the breadth and depth of his knowledge of the period's literature.)
Cheers!
I am not sure what your old joke about the coin has to do with anything we are discussing.
If you deny that we live in a universe of “uniformity of causes in a closed system” which I take to mean an Objective reality then you have abandoned reason and there is no basis for us to continue discussion any further.
I ‘ghink’ that was one of the best late-night posts I’ve read to explain the meta-physical aspects of modern science.
Thanks and I’ll be sure to include more of C.S. Lewis in my future readings. Esp. loved ‘The Four Loves’ available on audio too [in fact, maybe the only audio book recorded in his own voice].