I interpreted "first" to mean "first in human history". Since science is the method we currently use to understand the world, I assumed that no other methods were as good -- otherwise, we'd be using those. Human history is ongoing, though, so we could find better methods in the future.

Luke goes on to discuss different ways of fixing science, which led me to believe that he doesn't know of any other methods that are superior to science, either. If he did, presumably he'd be advocating that we drop science altogether, and replace it with these other methods.