Science seems to have usurped the qualities that once made the Church the force that gave Europe a sense of identity and coherence.
            Faith, dogma and heresy are now the tools deployed by those who hold positions of academic and institutional authority in the sciences.
            They are used to ensure that people do not stray too far from the acceptable theory and behaviour that binds communities together and that gives leadership classes a sense of predictability and control.
            Yet, as John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, remarked in his Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions in 2004, humanity is not the master of the inventions that shape modern life. Contemporary life is a confusion of unrecognised and unsupervised experiments, which are beyond control and comprehension.
            Richard Milton’s 1994 book, Alternative Science, explains how much our scientific culture has become a self-serving law unto itself. It wields words like reason and rationality as added weapons to impose its will, often without serious reference to the world in which we all must live. In a concluding passage he remarks that:
            “The trouble is that as creatures who further our grasp on the world by means of reason, rationality itself assumes significance for us; we prize it and seek after it.”
            The trouble is that the need to reduce experience to reason and rationality is often driven by a determination to subject it to the authority of those who hold positions of prestige and command.
            As the European Enlightenment ushered in a decline of the authority of the anointed cleric of the Church, it introduced the authority of the anointed scientist of the academy.
            Milton recalls Alfred Whitehead's reference to “endless, meaningless hurrying of material” in recognising the folly of such pretensions:
            “Only a non-rational, intuitive science can gain access to this ‘endless, meaningless hurrying of material’ – a science of the imagination.”
            Despite rhetoric that gives a contrary impression, the science of the imagination, the source of true innovation, has long been in disfavour amongst powerful scientific authorities in the West.
            Milton provides a long list of discoveries that have been scorned by the scientific establishment, including the discovery by Faraday of electromagnetism, by Edison of the electric lamp and by the Wright brothers of flight.
              He goes on to say in introducing his work that:
              “…in some ways big science, institutional science is gaining many of the trappings of a banana republic dictatorship: a revenue of billions that is unaccounted for and an administration that is unaccountable to taxpayers, except in a cosmetic way; the making and unmaking of reputations by a tame scientific press; the scientific police who make sure members of the profession are thinking along politically correct lines, and who control the content of scientific publications.”
            He goes on to question the value received for the $5 billion of public money spent each year on scientific research and remarks that “as things stand, anyone who is not a professional scientist (and precious few who are) simply has no way to” know. This squandering of public money in the maintenance of private income and privilege and in defence of unproductive projects and orthodoxies can become positively harmful in many areas of food and medicine.
            Many nutritious eating and holistic healing modalities, practiced and proved by a variety of cultures over thousands of years, have been marginalised and discredited by the mumbo-jumbo of modern science. This has in fact contributed substantially to the epidemic of degenerative disease and the escalating costs of health care that haunt the so-called developed world.
            Milton also addresses the insidious pressures placed on new graduates to conform with established interests and orthodoxies. It is clear that most research institutions have little tolerance for newcomers who would challenge comfortable certainties.
            But perhaps the establishment is most diabolical when it decides to promote a “science of the future” and an “ultimate tool of control” as a means of legitimising and popularising a cluster of related ideas and activities for future growth.
            It not infrequently gets the science wrong, as it has with microbiology. This is limited to simple chemical processes that are easily replicated in the laboratory but that are incapable of delivering on the wild and dangerous promises of genetic engineering.
            As Milton writes:
            “The very idea that microbiological processes are at root simple well-understood chemical reactions is a key tenet of modern reductionism. Yet the fact is that not one significant organic molecule, let alone cell component, has yet been synthesised from scratch.”
            It should not surprise that Alternative Science has done little to shake the scientific establishment. Allied, as it often is, with major corporate interests, modern scientific mythology has become an even more dominant force in modern times than the Church was in medieval times.