Just one point on this thread, Chris.
I believe it was you who first raised Bacon in the rather familiar “science has given us mobile phones” style of argument.
Bacon happened to be a name that quickly came up in my brief Internet search to understand better where Cornelius Hunter’s approach is coming from, on seeing this thread. Since he was fighting on several fronts, I’m not surprised he didn’t answer your point directly. (If it had been me I’d have been sure to disrupt the thread by saying that the Cistercians gave us blast furnaces; Aristotle, via Bede, gravity; Taoism gunpowder and paper and Adolph Hitler the VW and space travel). But here’s a quote from a careful Amazon review of one of his books:
Hunter begins by contrasting the methodologies of two great thinkers: Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. The former was an empiricist whereas the latter was a rationalist. Bacon was not very interesting in constructing a grand metaphysical or philosophical system within which science could operate. Instead, he simply advocated performing tests and following the data. By contrast Descartes was obsessed with the question of certainty, and constructed a mechanical vision of nature wherein all things were ordered by God so that they might accomplish their purpose without outside intervention. As Hunter shows, this view of nature became a powerful justification for theological naturalism. Theological naturalism, says Hunter, does not at all equate to atheism or metaphysical naturalism. On the contrary, it was often justified by arguments about the nature of God. Particularly influential was the notion that God would be greater if He were able to design a self-sufficient system which could produce all the order in the cosmos without outside intervention.
In other words, Hunter is a supporter of Bacon’s science: his objection is to the contrasting approach of Descartes (and later, the Enlightenment Deist rationalists like Leibniz - who of course was a direct metaphysical opponent of Newton in saying that God would obviously make the cosmos to run entirely on its own). Bacon, in fact, was not of this persuasion. Here’s a source on his views:
Not only did God arrange nature according to laws which made it predictable, but in his providential actions he also proceeded according to consistent principles and patterns. Although God’s actions were not predictable, except in so far as He revealed His intentions through prohecy, His consistency made the actions of the hand of providence recognizable to those who knew his ways.
Bacon, in other words, held that there are both lawlike and divinely contingent events in the world, which require to be distinguished. Descartes saw nature as a closed system in which no events were divinely directed: leading indirectly to an undeniable category of event which is not lawlike, cannot (on principle) be providential, and so must be due to a third causal category, Epicurean “chance”.
So as soon as one invokes “chance” in a scientific argument, you have opted for the metaphysics of Leibniz over Newton, and for that of Descartes over Bacon. There does seem to be a valid question of why this should be the correct option for contemporary science.