Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-6078851-20130318203252/@comment-6134883-20130403162004

Trouble with that scenario is that Emps was teaching faith - faith in reason and science is as much faith as faith in a god. Unfortunately it does NOT seem to be enough to repel chaos forces probably because it falls apart when faced with evidence that the materium isn't all. Now if he'd taught faith in Order and Control as opposed to uncontrolled chaos that might have been powerful enough to banish a daemon of the latter. His mistake was trying to pretend the immaterium did not exist - which it had long before the Chaos gods became a problem.

The trouble with faith solely in reason and science is that reason and science are not entities but methods for understanding and bringing order to the world. Applying those tools in the name of a transcendant Order (deified or not) would probably be effacious. Using them as blinkers against a frightening reality however most definitely was NOT.