In India, the internet’s promise of enlightened progress is being paradoxically hijacked to spread regressive thought. Digital platforms, especially WhatsApp and YouTube, have become powerful conduits for astrologers, religious demagogues, and mythologists to broadcast archaic and fundamentalist ideas.

For instance, popular YouTube channels run by astrologers attract millions of subscribers, promoting a mix of spiritual advice, pseudoscience, and sometimes politically charged narratives that blend mythology with modern life. This is not mere tradition-preserving; it is an active, often politically charged, campaign that promotes anti-science thinking, romanticises a mythologised past, and selectively distorts history to serve narrow agendas.

The danger lies in the medium’s potency. Algorithmic amplification creates echo chambers where obscurantist content thrives unchecked, eroding public trust in rational inquiry and verified facts.

This digital-enabled revivalism poses a profound societal challenge, threatening to undermine scientific temper, secular education, and historical integrity. It turns tools of connection into engines of division and regression.

Some people rightly question what “modern values” terrorists claim to uphold when they use sophisticated technology to murder innocent people who do not share their worldview. The reality is clear: science and technology are not the same. One can reject scientific thinking and humanistic values while still being technologically adept, even obsessed with technology.

Ultimately, the Indian paradox highlights a global truth: technology is morally neutral. Its impact depends on the hands that wield it. Without critical digital literacy and a vigorous defence of rational discourse, the information superhighway risks becoming a pathway back to a digital dark age.

And this persuades us to ask the question: Should there be a philosophy of science? The question is not merely academic; it is urgent. Especially in an age when technology has overtaken science, when the spirit of inquiry has been steadily replaced by technology-driven forces that define a new ideological culture rooted in aggressive consumerism and a distinctly anti-human bias.

The past two centuries were shaped by science. It helped unravel many mysteries of human existence and opened limitless frontiers of knowledge. The twenty-first century, however, appears determined to be governed by technological culture rather than scientific rationality. Technology can comfortably coexist with traditional, even archaic value systems without disturbing the social equilibrium. Science cannot. It has no patience for superstition or unverified belief.

Technology is therefore not synonymous with science; the two are neither identical nor interchangeable. A scientifically tempered mind can survive without technological crutches, but a technology-dependent individual need not possess either rationality or scientific temper.

Take the high-profile technocrats and gadget gurus of our time, flaunting the latest electronic comforts. Is there anything remotely scientific in their exhausted, repetitive discourses on lifestyle and convenience that leave behind a lingering stupor rather than insight? Science, when guided by humane philosophy, can elevate humanity. A society obsessed with machines, however, risks becoming stagnant, closed and progressively dehumanised.

Nearly a century ago, German philosopher Oswald Spengler warned of the decline of Western civilisation, arguing that technology had reduced every challenge to insignificance, leaving nothing meaningful left to conquer. As he put it in Man and Technics: "All things organic are dying in the grip of organisation. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural."

Ironically, technology today has emerged as the dominant ideology after the collapse of communist certainties, such as with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and amid ongoing critiques of capitalist excesses. These opposing systems converged in their shared distrust of human nature, and technology has stepped in to fill the ideological vacuum.

What was once expected to liberate humankind from tradition-bound drudgery has instead become a barrier to the fuller realisation of human values. The reason is simple: scientific advancement lacks a philosophical compass to guide and insulate it from destructive impulses. The era of celebrating every scientific feat as a miracle is nearing its end. Genetic manipulation, for instance, now evokes the ancient myth of Bhasmasur, whose own powers ultimately consumed him. A global alarm has already been sounded.

A science divorced from philosophy is engineered for short-term gains, often at the cost of long-term consequences. Without reflection, science reduces humans to insignificant components of a vast, centralised system that steadily devours privacy and freedom. Machines designed for precision and perfection push technologists towards irrelevance, turning them into virtual non-entities.

Modern humanity finds itself trapped in a peculiar dilemma. It cannot sever ties with the past and seeks solace in traditional wisdom that often lacks a scientific foundation. At the same time, its infatuation with technology encourages reckless disregard for long-term consequences. A philosophy of science alone can help humanity cut its umbilical cord to uncritical tradition while guiding it safely towards genuine knowledge and self-realisation.

The absence of philosophical restraint has led some scientists to engage in perilous research in the name of constructing artificial utopias. Without a rational safety valve, science loses its moral justification and shrinks the space for human ingenuity and creativity. When machines take over the initiative from humans, society drifts towards an intellectual dead end. Political dictatorships may be confronted, but the suffocating grip of machine culture is far harder to escape.

Had science and technology been guided by a coherent philosophy, humanity would not fear the machines it creates. Yet since the atomic explosion of 1945, collective imagination has been haunted by nightmares of technological apocalypse, alien domination, and civilisational collapse. From Huxley’s Brave New World, where he warns, "Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards"—to Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’, anxiety about the future has only deepened.

Why has modern man become so pessimistic? Why does every new invention provoke anxiety rather than reassurance? Why does each technological breakthrough seem to clog, rather than kindle, the divine spark within the human soul?

Perhaps science without philosophical roots only adds to humanity’s burden instead of alleviating it. Communication technologies and supersonic travel may have compressed the world into a global village, as Marshall McLuhan observed in ‘Understanding Media’ (1964): "The medium is the message," implying that technology shapes human interaction in ways that often prioritise form over meaningful content. But have they truly brought human beings closer to one another?

A sane philosophy of science could help organise ideas and machines in ways that respect human dimensions and moral limits, fostering a global culture that accounts for the logic and fallout of technological progress.

If science were philosophy-oriented, researchers might hesitate before venturing into forbidden territories or manipulating minds to produce a uniform, soulless mass. Without philosophy, science becomes an instrument of domination rather than enlightenment. And without thought and purpose, technology risks reducing its creators to mere spectators of their own undoing.