Mine is not an appeal to the authority of any religious truth in the face of contrary scientific evidence. Neither is it even remotely tinged by a post-modernist hostility to rationality. I reject emphatically the claim that most science can be dismissed or at least downgraded as socially constructed by the great and the powerful, although the enduring power of a paradigm, of established patterns of reasoning can help the self-interested to distort science for a time My appeal is to reason and evidence and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues. Much less is there validation to justify huge public expenditure on these phantoms.