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I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.
I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.
The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this
Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.
Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.
Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form
Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future
Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future
Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep
Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares
I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.
There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.
None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.
Yes, like the flaw with Star Trek's Klingons, that if they were as depicted, they would never have developed the technology they needed to establish their empire.
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You might be right that it is a strawman, but intriguingly, it is not a baseless strawman. The book title "in confident hope of a miracle" is a quote from a Spaniard of the time. At least one Spaniard was indeed that superstitious. The difficulty is that, with no Gallup polling from back, then it is hard to know whether that level of superstition was common enough to matter.
There are also difficult issues around compartmentalization, both of society and within the minds of individuals. I think that there were sharp class distinctions between tradesmen and nobles. So tradesmen would be level headed and practical in regard to their trade. Shipwrights would build seaworthy ships based on trial and error and folk-naval-architecture, then the noble would swoop in to have the priest bless the ship to make it seaworthy. Within the head of the noble there would be two watertight compartments. One would commission ships, but only from shipwrights whose previous ships had made it back from America. The other would navigate the treacherous waters around heresy by ensuring that the importance of the priest was never doubted. The obvious point, that only the shipwrights track record mattered would be carefully ignored.
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