If scientists achieve progress, Thomas Kuhn tells us, it is not because they obey special and inflexible rules but rather because they work within social structures that are unusually efficient in defining and solving problems. Others, more extreme, assert that scientific progress is illusory and that science is simply a tool used by interest groups to maintain and extend their political and social power. Just as the progressive nature of scientific knowledge has been challenged, so too have old assumptions about the relations between science and technology, medicine, and religious belief. Today, few specialists in the history of technology would accord science a central role in the development of technology prior to about 1870 or argue for a simple uni-directional model of the relationship between science and technological change in the decades since. Scientific knowledge is one among many resources that inventors or engineers may draw upon, but the precise contribution that science makes to technology varies from case to case.
Engineers often work outside the realm within which scientific theory has useful guidance to offer.
Where once simple answers sufficed, historians of technology now struggle to find ways to express the complexity of the issue with which they deal. Much the same could be said of recent scholarship on the relations between science and medicine. Where there was once consensus there is controversy. As for the warfare between science and religion, those patient enough to search will find many shades of opinion in the secondary literature. By and large historians of science seem far more interested in understanding the role of religious values in nurturing the scientific enterprise than in developing or supporting the old warfare thesis.