(1) ... why [did] science embrace empiricism and the scientific method?
(2) ... what [would be] the consequences of rejecting [the scientific method] and going back to the way research was pursued prior to its adoption?...
RE (1): From what I understand, Sir Francis Bacon [1561–1626] — who is usually credited as the founder of the modern scientific (empirical) method — proposed to replace the deductive, syllogistic mode of logical reasoning advanced by Aristotle and the Mediaeval scholastic thinkers with a new inductive approach.
Rather than deductive reasoning from given propositions (syllogism), which seems not ever directly to touch on actual phenomena that we observe ("sense"), Bacon thought that if one wants to understand the cause of some phenomenon — and he at least seems to be suggesting that if you want to know what a thing is, you do have to know its causal pedigree (so to speak) — the best way to proceed is to collect data and construct tables reflecting the observed presence or absence of the phenomenon in question, then to compare the respective tables. This practice would be the means of terminating the "infinite error" that syllogistic reasoning seems in his mind to perpetuate.
As Bacon put it (in The Great Instauration),
...I am laboring to lay the foundation, not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.... [I]t seeks for the sciences not arrogantly in the little cells of human wit, but with reverence in the greater world....Yet later he adds:
I reject ... demonstration by syllogism, as acting too confusedly, and letting nature slip out of its hands....
...[T]he greatest change I introduce is in the form itself of induction and the judgment made thereby....
Now what the sciences stand in need of is a form of induction which shall analyze experience and take it to pieces, and by a due process of exclusion and rejection lead to an inevitable conclusion....
...I hold that true logic ought to enter the several provinces of sciences armed with a higher authority than the principles of those sciences themselves [e.g., methodological materialism], and ought to call those putative principles to account until they are fully established. [Please note: methodological materialists routinely dispense with this requirement.]... For certain it is that the senses deceive: but then at the same time they supply the means of discovering their own errors....RE (2): Is this a trick question??? Who is proposing that "empiricism and the scientific method" ought to be abolished, that we might "go back" to the "way research was pursued" before Bacon came along? Certainly not me!The sense fails in two ways. Sometimes it gives no information, sometimes it gives false information.... [I]t is a great error to assert that the sense is the measure of things....
In the first place, little, if any "research" as we moderns understand that term, can be conducted on the basis of logical deduction alone. That is a situation where you have a "mill," but no "grist" for it to "grind."
Secondly, there is no reason to say that deduction vs. induction is some kind of a zero-sum game: where one is the "right way" and the other the "wrong way."
I daresay if you actually were to analyze your own thought processes, you would find that sometimes you think inductively, and sometimes you think deductively. You go back and forth all the time, seamlessly. Which mode you're operating in at a given point of time depends on the nature of the problem you're dealing with at that time.
Thirdly, Bacon's method indubitably did vastly increase the "human utility [of nature] and [human] power." This is not NECESSARILY a bad thing. But that discussion is beyond the present scope here; for that would take us into the moral realm....
To boil it all down, to me Aristotle's "deduction" and Bacon's "induction" are simply different logical tools. Which tool you use depends on the nature of the job.
What we do not want to have, however, is a knee-jerk preference for a tool just because it's familiar. This situation has been described as, "If all you've got is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail."
I would not have a single problem whatsoever with methodological materialism except for its deeply-engrained belief that everything in nature is some kind of species of "nail."
Must leave it there for now, dear tacticalogic. Thank you so much for writing!
OK. Describe a screwdriver, and tell me how to make one.
Methodological materialism is a 'tool' that carries the philosophical baggage of atheism. I believe it brings no benefit and puts unnecessary limits on science - it should be discarded and I see no need for it to be replaced with anything. It tries to explain away the Big Bang and a universe fine tuned for life with the 'multiverse' - the only merit to the multiverse theory is that it means there is a universe somewhere out there where Richard Dawkins is a rabid Creationist - but it's still ultimately meaningless. Look how methodological materialism tries to explain away human consciousness with no free-will or 'self' - which means no responsibility. Look how it compares human and chimp DNA as if we could compare the moon landing with flinging poo at one another.