Reply #1: This wouldn't be the first time it's happened

[LeftishBrit]

It comes up especially, at least in my case, when defending vaccines and other aspects of modern medicine from those who insist that all medical research is corrupted (some of it is, like most things sometimes are!), and that this therefore makes medical science invalid.

Some of us were accused by one DU-er of 'worshipping at the altar of reductionist science'!

IRL, I once had a student who worshipped Lacan and Derrida and other French philosophers - I have no idea whether he was even interpreting them correctly - and kept trying to engage his psychology lecturers in debates as to whether 'science is just another religion'. He suggested that we were only studying psychology as a scientific subject because it was 'the Zeitgeist', etc. This was in 2004, when Bush had just been re-elected, partly because of the influence of anti-science right-wingers, so I felt decidedly impatient with the view that science was the 'Zeitgeist'!