The investigative practices of the early modern sciences, when they function solely as regulative instruments for isolating discrete areas of investigation from every larger interpretive context, definitely allow for an enormous range of discoveries and advances and predictive power on the parts of researchers. After all, Newtonian physics suffices for many calculations, even if it only approximates the accuracy of quantum calculations; so to the mechanical fiction can deliver useful results, despite its inability accurately to reflect the laws of life. But this usefulness is entirely dependent on the humility, tentativeness, and ascetical narrowness with which, as a matter of simple practical necessity, those methods are applied. When they cease to be regarded as mere useful fictions, conveniently simplifying reality and authorizing only very limited conjectures, and are instead permitted to metastasize into a metaphysical claim about the nature of reality, they can yield nothing but ridiculous category errors. At that point, the sheer wanton grandness of the ambitions they prompt renders them impotent. The moral, I suppose, is that a local falsehood, prudently employed, can often grant us knowledge of certain universal truths, but that a universal falsehood can only blind us to all local truths.

— David Bentley Hart (as Psyche), All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, 333