> has given us more fruitful and abundant insight into the world and our lives in it than any other approach ever tried

But this is yet another argument over definition or a value judgement. I have spent most of my life studying math and science, and yet reading Dostoyevsky has given me much more abundant insight into my life than anything science ever taught me. The point is, of course, what do "insight" and "relevance" mean? Their meaning can be entirely subjective, and is certainly not scientific. For that matter, what does "meaning" mean?

There's no doubt that science has improved our lives, but so has politics (which has often been very much influenced by contemporary science). True, technology's effects are quantifiable and measurable, but being quantifiable and measurable is not the only way of assigning value.

As to non-naturalist ethics, I see absolutely no problem with concepts that are irreducible to atoms. Neither is math, even though math was created/discovered by humans, which live in this universe and are composed of atoms. I think that you're misrepresenting those ideas when you're describing them as "essential components of the universe", when the universe is merely the arena where these concepts form. The fact that you can find a causal chain -- a reduction, if you will -- does not mean you can always describe the end of the chain in terms of the first link (I'll get to that again later).

In short, I don't think you can reduce, say, literature, to atoms and forces even though the author and the reader are composed of atoms, and the reading process involves photons hitting receptors that start a chemical reaction in the retina. Doing so will teach us nothing of value about literature.

I think that it is your position -- that only that which can be reduced to atoms -- that lacks justification. Saying that science and technology are quantifiably or "physically" useful is almost (not quite) a tautology. A shovel is more useful than a pen for digging holes, but who says digging holes is more worthwhile than writing? Even if you think it is, you cannot prove it scientifically, because science can say nothing about values, only point at relationships between causes and outcomes.

> As we learn more and more fundamentally independent propositions and unite our disparate magisteria: wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen! And this will extend to the moral realm as well, so that when we say torturing puppies is wrong, we will know that we are describing a matter of fact.

That doesn't follow. First, I don't know how science can teach us that something is "wrong". I don't know by what scientific or mathematical mechanism you can ever make the jump from the "is" to the "ought" -- at the very best science can teach us that if we seek a certain outcome, we should take a certain action, but can it tell us what outcome we should seek?

But it's even worse than that because there is another philosophical, unscientific mediating factor here, which is "understanding". Being able to describe the universe and understanding it are two very different things. We can know without understanding. In fact, I can even give the last statement a more mathematical facet: that a process B reduces to a more fundamental process A, does not guarantee that fully knowing A will let us predict B because of intractability. We already know that most "interesting", i.e. complex processes in the universe are intractable, so at best, they are theoretically reducible, but rarely practically so. Our understanding of particle physics can teach us little about psychology (although it may assist in building instruments to study psychology).

So I disagree both with your assumption that we can know (or rather, that knowing means fully understanding or predicting), as well with the supposed consequences of knowledge.