It's been the case for exactly two hundred years, so we may as well admit it: the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was wrong. Poetry is not the "unacknowledged legislator of the world," as he put it. Science is. Not only that, but science is the "true religion" of the Western world. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. As the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich thought, "[The sciences] can be a very solid expression of ultimate concern in secular language… as long as the ultimate concern or 'infinite passion' is still in them and shines through them."
