Let's try one more line of thought before we turn to religion. We have traced modern science down from the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the last chapter, this led us to conclude that there are simply a number of problems that this kind of science – science based on the machine metaphor, in some sense or another – cannot tackle – cannot even start to tackle. Is the problem with us, namely, that we have hitched our star to science of the wrong kind? The question now is not so much whether we have distorted the actual history of science – no one is going to deny that machine-metaphor science has been dominant – but whether the science itself has been on the wrong track. Should science have adopted other root metaphors and gone that way instead? Would we now find that our questions could be answered?

Really there are two questions here. First, why has the machine-metaphor kind of science predominated? Second, what alternatives are there, and do they answer our questions? Do they perhaps leave other questions – questions answered by the machine metaphor – unanswered? There are some fairly ready answers to the first question. Modern science – science since the Scientific Revolution – exhibits various epistemic virtues. It is coherent within itself and consistent across different fields or areas. In other words, it doesn't like contradictions.