However, I suppose if there is a constant force of degradation working to undermine scientific thinking, then you can figure a life's work discovering phenomena helps counter the deterioration

First off, I'm very serious on this topic, way too serious, and nobody really devotes the kind of time to grasp it.

The most articulate on the topic is New York Professor Joseph Campbell. Man lived to 84 and was a teacher at a university that encouraged student criticism (aka reddit comment style) for 38 years.

I've also come to articulate in my own way... We live, tops 120 years, with modern medical. Let's say the universe is 14,000,000,000 years old. I really don't think it's possible for any collective group of scientist to figure it all out. It's just inherent in the fact that so much of that history is not recoded, and how would you record it all anyway? it's just so damn vast. Oh yha, also let me emphasize, as Campbell does, we spend the first 20 years learning how to function, then our final decades getting weak and frail.

tldr; our meat-computer brains are damn limited compared to what we know so far of the universe.

Campbell gives a great lecture on this in 1961:

TRACK 7: Science: the Continual Quest

But now when one says truth as a scientist one is being sentimental, because really the wonderful thing and the great challenge of the scientific revelation is that science itself does not pretend to be true. It does not pretend to be final.

It is simply an organization of working hypotheses—hypotheses that seem to take account of the facts, as we now know them. But is there any intention to stay with these facts? No. There is a continuous quest for more, as though one were eager to grow as though the life of man, and of society here, were to be based on new things, on change, on transformation, rather than on petrifaction and rigidity. And so we don’t know anything. And even science itself is not the truth; it is only, so to say, an eagerness for the truth no matter where it may lead.

And so here again we have a still greater revelation than that of anything the old texts have to say; the old texts comfort us with horizons.

They tell us that a loving, a kind, a just father is out there. According to the scientific view nobody knows what is out there, or if there is any out there at all. There is just a display of things that our senses bring to us, and we are dealing with those. But what lies beyond is an ultimate mystery, and it is a mystery that is so great that it is going to be inexhaustible in its revelations. And man has to be great enough to receive it.

There is no thou shalt anymore. There is nothing you have to believe, nothing you have to do.

And if you want to play the game of the Middle Ages, go ahead, but don’t tell anybody else that that’s the only game there is. Or if you want to play the game of the Chinese Mandate of Heaven, go ahead—those are all lovely games. And the scientific game, after all, may not be any truer, but it is vaster, and it takes in a bigger range of facts and experience.

So it is this terrific moment that we face; it is a moment that has been maturing so to say since the days of the Greeks. And since the days of the Second World War, it has gone through all the planet.

[Previous sections of his lecture he covered the Greek scientific method, and considers it foundation of modern world, including his own approach as a university professor]