What drives science?
Victorian philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861 -1947) contended that human curiosity alone could not explain continued scientific research. Something else was needed: broadly rational and predictable results. If two lizards looked the same from the outside but had completely different organs on the inside, indeed, if the anatomy of every lizard you found differed, then after a while science would stop.
Continued arbitrary and capricious results do not make for explainable events. There must be a rational answer at some point to justify a rational search. And a knowledge that consistent discovery transcends individual men and their specific results. You may think what Mendel or Darwin found was right, but will that thought help you when you are working outside their field, constructing a table of elements? A larger, all encompassing faith in nature, not just men, is needed. What does this imply? Easily put, an ordered universe bespeaks an ordered God. These quotes are from Whitehead's1925 book "Science and The Modern World."
"When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. . . "
"In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect on instinctive habits of mind. Any definite occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot, or might issue from some impersonal, inscrutable order of things. There was not the same confidence in the intelligible rationality of a personal being . . ."
"The faith in the order of nature which has made possible the growth of science is an example of a deeper faith. This faith cannot be justified by any inductive generalisation. It springs from direct inspection of the nature of things as disclosed in our own immediate present experience. There's no parting from your own shadow."
"To experience this faith is to know that in being ourselves we are more than ourselves; to know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the uttermost depths of reality: to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves in a system of things: to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, and the harmony of aesthetic achievement: to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as an iron necessity, the harmony stands before it as a living ideal moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues."