Modern science cannot be given sole responsibility for the diminution of intelligence and the rise of atheism and agnosticism. Nor can modern science be blamed for the death of metaphysics and the privatization and cultural eclipse of religion. Certainly there have been scientists who have been atheists and propounded a specifically materialistic metaphysics while simultaneously rejecting religion and metaphysics. Jacques Monod, a biochemist, says that: .
It is perfectly true that science attacks values. Not directly, since science is no judge of them and must ignore them. man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes (1974:160). .
When science is projected as a religion (scientism), it becomes highly unscientific and results in being bad as both a science and a religion. Many scientists recognize, especially in the age of quantum theory, that any scientific utopianism is, fortunately, a long dead dream. The physicist, David Bohm, asks: .
Is there not a kind of "hubris" that seems rather often to penetrate the very fabric of scientific thought, and capture the mind of scientists, whenever any particular scientific theory has been successful for some period of time? This takes the form of a fervently held belief that what has been discovered will continue to work indefinitely, ultimately to cover the whole of reality (Lewis:128). .
When scientists forget or fail to learn that science itself is a symbol system, based upon a reimagination of the cosmos in the form of theories, models and paradigms, there is the psychological danger of becoming scientific literalists who take the symbol or metaphor to be reality in itself. Appleyard highlights what one of the great quantum theoreticians, Niels Bohr, stressed: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is.