Modern Western science displaced metaphysics and religion as the supreme authority over knowledge

Evidence

Being a system of “very relative knowledge,” and nourished in a specifically materialist environment, Western science tends to exclude more than include, having been “purchased at the expense of forgetting all that [is] truly worthy of interest.” What is worthy of interest is the enveloping structure that must frame and control science, giving it its meaning within a larger order of things. There is then a determined continuity between science and the higher forms of knowledge, the former issuing from and directed by the latter. Western science has not just lost this continuity, but also exacerbated the discontinuity to a degree of exclusion; it has, in effect, taken the place of metaphysics and God himself, thereby dethroning religion and sitting in its place. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 290

Categorization

• DEFINE: Guénon’s term “epistemic sovereignty” is named here as Hallaq’s prior concept, capturing science’s takeover of the highest epistemic authority.
• XREF: connects to: Western epistemology’s root metaphors sexualize and dominate the known — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1352; Modern science grounds truth rules in expert consensus, not transcendental authority — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 248; Science and ethics both stem from the same Western choice about truth and justice — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 130 (+3 more)