THE RANDLE REPORT

WHAT IS ‘SCIENCE’?

Although bandied about in general conversations, newspaper reports and television shows with the implication that it is the fount of all knowledge, the home of rationality and the universal arbitrator, ‘science’ is neither so easily defined nor clearly understood even by those who regularly invoke it.

The concept planted in our perception by education and the media is one of earnest professionals studying and experimenting to uncover universal truths, and seeking the means to better the lives of those it serves.

Though such people surely exist, a cursory examination shows the generality to be a myth. There is no universal science. The word is here being used as a catch-all for a number of diverse and often contradictory disciplines. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that it will be used to bamboozle. 

‘Science’ says there are hundreds of tiny nicotine receptors in your brain that force you to go on buying pharmaceutical products instead of cigarettes. Exactly which science - which scientist - would that be?

Physics is a science that has served us well. It has practical applications; it can predict things; and it has greatly facilitated our progress. Chemistry, likewise, has beaten a path to greater understanding, though its practitioners might not have reached the same conclusions as their physicist colleagues. With biology we get into a rather woollier area in which the ‘scientific method’ as we fondly believe it to exist has come something of a cropper.

Who decides what is a ‘science’ and what isn’t? And on what criteria?

A TV ‘science correspondent’ will consult the opinion of a psychiatrist, but would run a mile from an astrologer; yet astrology, in all but name, is very much closer to being a science than psychiatry.

There is no effort in this book to disparage the achievements or motives of the many people who have played a part in the advancement of the various sciences, or their valuable contribution to our understanding of the material universe.

But it is not logical - not scientific, in fact - to allow our lives to be ruled by false and idealised notions.

Science as a method of questioning, exploring and learning is greatly to be supported.

‘Science’, the vague and undefined authority with a spurious claim to mastery of life and the universe is nothing more or less than another dodgy belief system spreading ignorance and slavery under the guise of enlightenment.


From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository