No, not at all. The belief in big metanarratives that explain everything in history has been pretty systemically challenged since the mid-20th century. This is what you might call intellectual modernism; the understanding that everything in existence can be made sense of in huge, systemic models that comprehensively explain everything about a particular subject (for example you have Darwin's theory of natural selection to explain biology, Freud's theory of the unconscious to explain human behaviour, Marx's dialectical materialism to explain historical progress...).

Beginning with Heidegger but especially with Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, intellectuals started to criticize these grand theories by arguing that these theories were themselves products of their own time and place in history and therefore historical processes that could be studied, rather than absolute statements about the order of things in the world. Their interpretations were based in the assumption that concepts like truth and knowledge are the products of historical processes, which kind of throws a wrench in the very concept of grand theories which posit themselves to be objectively true.

As well, in terms of historical methodology, some historians started distancing themselves from grand theories starting in the early 20th century by arguing that these theories simplified and reduced actual lived historical experiences into caricatures whose sole purpose was to fulfill the expectation of the grand theory.

For example, a lot of medievalists have deconstructed the concept of "feudalism" that is inherent in Marxism's teleological grand theory of historical progress by looking at how "feudal" societies across Europe actually functioned, and uncovered that there was no real uniformity in socio-political-economic relationships and that they actually varied enormously across time and space throughout the Middle Ages.

So to sum up, in my own opinion, we've moved on since the days of grand theories of history because the actual sources show us that things were more complicated than our modernist predecessors anticipated and because their own modernist theories were inarguably products of 19th century thought, rather than objective and scientific observations on how the world works.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

• Theodore Sturgeon

History is a science in the sense that it is an organized body of knowledge, a discipline with rules of evidence—but it is not a science in the sense that hypotheses can be directly tested; you cannot re-run the same events with different variables as you might in an experiment in physics of chemistry. On top of that, history involves some of the most unpredictable variables in existence: human beings. The only constant of human nature is its tendency to contrariness. Laws and metanarratives are a kind of model for history, trying to capture elements of human behavior.

Models have at best limited applicability—and that goes for more than just history, it applies equally well to the "hard" sciences. The ideal for a model is to usefully describe the behavior of a set of data, and because no model can be exact, this is going to extrapolation from a set of initial conditions. The better the model, the more closely it "predicts" behavior that fits your data. However, this is very much dependent on initial conditions, and...coming back around to the above comment on human beings, their behavior can be very difficult to model, and assumptions about initial conditions are likely to be far off.

That doesn't mean models and laws are useless. Economics, for example, is a very quantitative discipline interrelated with history, and they use modeling extensively. Anthropology and related disciplines too can use models for all sorts of approximations—with the understanding of the limitations of the model, and how it can and cannot be effectively used. Carbon dating, for example, is a type of modelling used to measure the age of organic items based on carbon decay. It is fairly accurate and widely used, and historians (especially those dealing with ancient history) often use carbon dating extensively as complementary evidence. If the sheep a book was made from dates back to c.1400, you may still not know who wrote it but you can rule out somebody from c.1300 or c.1500, barring unusual circumstances.

The kind of metanarrative you're probably thinking of are things like "Great Man Theory" or the "Cyclical History" proposed by Spengler. These were very popular in the 19th and early 20th century—and largely exploded or fell apart in the mid-to-late 20th century, because as models they were fairly bad. The people involved often used a very limited set of data points and questionable methodology, often full of biases (conscious or unconscious), and the result was...less useful. It was useful enough for people that, at the time, wanted to encapsulate knowledge and issue dire predictions about the impending and inevitable collapse of civilization or how the stories of history were the biographies of key players rather than the quiet narratives of all the millions of other people—but as tools, they were discovered to be missing out on rather large chunks of history, and so sweeping narratives tend to be replaced by more nuanced narratives—although this can (and has) happen very slowly, and there's a lot of remnants of the old theories lurking in odd historical quarters.

One of the major issues with metanarratives and history is the predictive aspect: in trying to capture a human behavior, some folks think they can then influence or predict it, as Isaac Asimov described with his "Psychohistory" in the Foundation novels. This is part and parcel of the use of models with regard to Economics. History, though, is a lot less focused of a discipline than economics, and its really difficult to get a workable model that pertains to any aspect of human activity over a long period of time—and that's provided you have enough data to even sketch out a rough model. This might be counterintuitive to a lot of folks that remember the old adage from Santayana that "Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it."—and it is taken as a given in Western civilization that it is common wisdom to look back at history for similar examples to present-day or future crises, to see how they were handled in the past, and how effective that was.

But this is, again, a matter of modeling. The events of the past are never identical to events of the current day, or the future. What worked or didn't work in the past might work today or tomorrow, because the conditions will have changed. The error in a lot of these metanarratives is assuming that many aspects of human life and society are relatively constant over periods of time, but as students of history know, that isn't necessarily the case. Military historians will probably be quick to jump in about how such-and-such general went to fight a new conflict with tactics from the last conflict, unaware or unable to adapt to the changing conditions and technology on the battlefield—and much the same goes for every other sub-field you can name. A deep understanding of history involves an appreciation for complexity and causes—the very things that tend to get lost when you try to apply a model or metanarrative to history as a whole.

So as a historian, I tend to stick to the data—I don't ignore the narratives, but I try to understand where they come from, and how (and if) they apply to what I'm looking at. A lot of the time, an understanding of past historical methods is necessary to appreciate (and tear apart) older reference works. Because historians are about more than dumbly repeating as gospel what a previous generation of historians have written—and that too is part of a change in the field, from how it used to be.