A major access point for understanding the problem of the rise of modern science can be found in the multiple institutional arrangements that create and sustain the role of the scientist. In directing our attention to that problem, we should consider the broader institutional arrangements that entail the scientific role-set. From one point of view, those values and commitments that constitute the scientist's role-set can be called the ethos of science, as I noted in Chapter 1. As Robert Merton originally expressed the idea, the norms of the ethos of science “are expressed in the form of prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences, and permissions.” And these are centered on the values of universalism, communalism, organized skepticism, and disinterestedness.

Although sociologists of science in the past have attempted to view the role of the scientist as that of a narrowly defined cultural actor, I have suggested just the opposite: the scientist is and always has been a purveyor of knowledge affecting the widest reaches of thought and even metaphysics – though scientists today would deny involvement in any such thing. In part this disclaimer is a defensive self-effacement that may derive from the narrowness of contemporary scientific specialization and problem solving. On the other hand, it comes from a neglect of the overall role of science in society and the ways in which the scientific vision shapes all of our perceptions of physical, cultural, and psychological reality. Given all of the twentieth-century breakthroughs in modern biology and biochemistry that have made possible various forms of cloning and genetic engineering, it is apparent that scientific inquiry does indeed raise ethical and moral issues. These issues concern not only how scientific knowledge should be used but also what forms of inquiry are ethically permissible.

The breakthrough to modern science centered on the freedom of nonecclesiastical elites to describe (and explain) the known world – freely, publicly, and completely – in terms radically at variance with the received religious wisdom. Although Copernicus and other astronomers, especially Galileo and Kepler, were intent to establish the science of astronomy, there is no denying the fact that their scientific claims radically altered the Judeo-Christian worldview.