Indeed, it's like seeing through a filter rather than directly. The upshot is ever a reduction of reality to the capability of the filter -- and the filter is expressly designed to exclude certain things altogether, on principle. But those things are still in the world nonetheless! They still substantially contribute to the constitution of reality! And so they don't just go away when you refuse to look at them.
If Krauss were to have his way, I guess string theory would make the list of "forbidden areas" where science is not supposed to go -- joining ID, and heaven knows probably the next really interesting scientific paradigm to emerge.
Or so it seems to me.
Thanks so much for the "chuckle" at Krauss' expense, dear sister. This guy seems to be quite worried about "attacks" on the "purity" of methodological naturalism. His defense seems to be the refusal to admit any possibility of scientific theoretical development according to any new theory that does not fit the Procrustean bed of that tiresome ontological monism, "matter in all its motions is all that there is." Sure. And science doesn't use mathematics everyday. People like this are walking self-contradictions!
Well, my two-cents' worth anyhoot....