Science's signature lifestyle choice is to confer on mental exertion all the qualities previously reserved for physical exertion, such as size, speed and duration. This point helps to illuminate a peculiar feature of what it means to lead a scientific life. Even if science has been historically carried aloft by theological sentiment, there is no denying that science has served to demystify the idea of divine creation. Prima facie the reason is clear: the sorts of discipline that science requires of the human mind are modelled on – if not outright specialized versions of – disciplines applied to the body. Perhaps in that sense only, science is extremely “down-to-earth” Scientists effectively learn to treat their minds as organs or instruments for the efficient processing of information, in the hope of producing knowledge of potentially universal scope and relevance. In this way, the mind loses its mystery as a realm untouched by matter. Indeed, psychologists today officially trace their shift from a speculative to an experimental discipline to when, in the mid-nineteenth century, they began to study systematically the sources of “fatigue” behind observational error in astronomy. Soon thereafter physicists and physicians flooded a field previously populated by philosophers and theologians.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that the rather severe mental discipline required of a scientific life is itself a concession to a godless materialism: materialism perhaps, but hardly godless. On the contrary, the earliest precedent for the austerity demanded of a life in science is Christian monasticism, a solitary pursuit tied to disciplining the land’s biodiversity for purposes of fully realizing its divine potential – not least in wine! Modern science and technology were born of this sensibility, which by the nineteenth century had revolutionized our understanding of heredity. I refer here to the founder of genetics, Gregor Mendel, whose experimentally controlled, mathematically informed studies of the consequences of producing hybrid pea plants were conducted in a Moravian monastery, whose chief administrator he eventually became.