It might seem that way until you realize that (proper) science must eventually be based on physicalism. Unless you accept the notion that the world can be fully understood by observing its physical properties (the question "what is a physical property?" is of course an important one), you'll have to reject science as an ultimately pointless endeavour. You can't trust the foundations of science, and thus science itself, if you believe there is "more" than what can be measured. Specifically, if you believe in divine beings, you must logically reject the scientific method.

FTA:

The Foldscope design accommodates different optical configurations, including spherical ball lenses, spherical micro-lens doublets (such as a Wollaston doublet), and more complex assemblies of aspheric micro-lenses.

So W^X is still not necessarily a problem. I interpreted ThisIsNotAName's post as "requiring execheap rather than execmod smells like Bad Things(TM)," which is true: it says something about a project in general when you need to be able to violate W^X (execheap), rather than explicitly switching between W and X (execmod). Whether you'll be granted execmod or not is really a separate problem.

Can you explain how W^X is the problem here? As far as I can understand it, JIT compilation and dynamic recompilation should work fine with W^X enabled, as long as the process has the execmod permission.