ABSTRACT
There has been a long-standing conflict in the history of culture between science and religion, reason and passion. The growth of pseudoscience can be seen in many other areas. The fact that science is essential to our technological civilization is well recognized by some of the critics of science—which brings the author to still another dimension of the growth of irrationality: the proliferation of pseudoscience. Western democratic societies are being swept by other forms of irrationalism, often blatantly antiscientific and pseudoscientific in character. One even finds proponents of forms of subjectivity among the philosophers of science, those who claim that historical conditions or psychological factors are largely responsible for revolutions in scientific thinking. Scientific research all too often has been controlled by private interests for their profit or by governments for indoctrination and control. Scientific researchers in their fields undoubtedly endeavor to use careful methods to test their explanatory hypotheses.
