The English term science predates what we today call science by many centuries.
Originally derived from the Latin scientia, it referred to a body of knowledge — any knowledge.
But later, especially starting in the early 17th century, the meaning began to change. It became narrowed down to mean knowledge acquired from empirical evidence.
I hear you ask — if some knowledge is not supported by empirical evidence, then shouldn’t it be discarded? To which I answer: yes, absolutely.
But the term acquired that narrower meaning not because the world suddently woke up to the above realization in the 17th century. (I understand this is what many “history” textbooks would have us believe in their renaissance narratives — but that is just plain propaganda for ideological purposes.)
The narrowing down that happened was of a different nature. To understand that, we need to look at the Aristotelian framework of acquiring knowledge - this was the original/classical framework that existed. In this framework, the explanation of a phenomenon — natural or metaphysical — needed to address its different aspects (often called causes): material cause (what it is made of), formal cause (what makes it the kind of thing it is), efficient cause (what produces that change or effect), final cause (what something is for, its purpose) etc.
As you can see, in the Aristotelian framework, an explanation was sought for many different aspects of a given observation. But that kind of inquiry began to be replaced with a different approach:
No more causes of natural things should be admitted than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their phenomena. — Isaac Newton, Principia
Let’s take the example of Newton’s explanation of the phenomenon of gravity to illustrate this principle in action. For Newton, the inverse-square law was a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon of gravity because that mathematical equation described what was being observed. However, in the Aristotelian framework, that would have counted only as an incomplete picture of gravity, because that explanation left out the other aspects, such as efficient causality (what produces gravity), for example.
So, what we see here is the gradual de-emphasizing of certain kinds of questions that could be asked of any phenomenon (natural or metaphysical) and an increasing tendency to declare that a mathematical description fitting the empirical data represents everything that needs to be known.
What ends up happening as decades pass by is that this way of thinking starts to re-define knowledge itself. From there, it begins to color the very understanding of reality. And that is how we end up with the situation we have today — anything that cannot be measured is not real.
And that shift in thinking is what we see reflected in the definition of the word science as well.
Based on the historical development described above, it is also easy to see how we ended up with another phenomenon that affects people’s lives quite directly. That, the pursuit of this new kind of science often make people absurdists.
Because final causality was never a serious question to be considered, the new science offers no serious answer either. Hence, for someone whose only way of knowing is this new kind of science, he has no access to any knowledge of final causality (i.e., purpose) at all.