They were comprehensive attitudes to life with a strong moral component. It should have been clear that discussion of such rival attitudes to life is not a vice nor a waste of time but an intellectual necessity, particularly in times of violent change. Popper'' work, however, seemed to outlaw all such argument from the province of thought, ruling that, since it was not science, it was metaphysics - a word which he used vaguely and which many of his audience took to mean simply nonsense. There followed a wave of fairly mindless scientism, of which Atkins's remarks, quoted above, are an example. This crude view is not, of course, often defended explicitly today.
Many scientists hate it.
Yet as a myth, an imaginative pattern underlying more moderate thought, it still haunts us. Irrelevant notios about how to make thought 'hard' and scientific by imitating physical science still continue to distort medicine and the social sciences. It is time that these ghosts were laid. The Limitless Power of Science' in Nature's Imagination, ed. John Cornwell, Oxford University Press 1995, pp 123-4 and 129.