THE DEBATE ON SCIENTIFIC^ TEMPER 59 door-step of science. Where a broad spectrum of social welfare policies, medicinal, educational and so on, made possible by scientific advance cannot be wished away, Nandy is quick to appropriate the credit for these for institutions of every hue but not for science. If science demands that other "systems of thought" be criticized from the point of view of its exacting standards, Nandy demands that science must equally be open to criticism by the standards of faith. But this is ridiculous, for scientific ideas must be open to scientific criticism and so indeed they are. It is the worst kindofoppurtunism to deny this in the name of "equality of cross-criticism". It leads Nandy to the absurd conclusion that incantations are perhaps better than vaccines and antiseptics, for the latter enrich the monopolists, while the former, if they do nothing to protect the health of the poor, at least, or so Nandy supposes, provide some psychological satisfaction. Of 'course this psuedo-philosophic posture is not without important political or intellectual support. President Reagan of the United States of America, during his election compaign, argued in favour of treating both the "evolutionism" of Darwin and the "creationism" of the Bible as "scientific". At a far more sophisticated level, Feyerabend, the self-proclaimed anarchist and flippant Dadaist, whom Nandy holds in such esteem that he feels every "literate" should be familiar with his arguments, has provided intellectual currency for this trend, Not satisfied with this, Nandy had resorted to dropping names of Western philosophers of science, in the hope that his distortions both of the history of science and of their positions would go unchallenged. It is on the authority of a person like de Santillana that he claims that in the case of Galileo "it was the church which proved itself more open and sought to have plural images of the cos-mos. Galileo, like the signatories to the statement, thought he knew the truth and wanted to oust all other concepts of truth". It is worth noting that Santillana himself contrasts the relative "openness" of the Church not with Galileo's attitude but with the posture of the Committee on Un-American Activities which subjected Oppenheimer to investigation in the 1950s. That Nandy is being dishonest and not merely incompetent in overlooking this fact is evident from Santillana's views regarding Galileo: "Galileo had no advocates in court, nor was there any discussion of the Copernican theories as such. Galileo was not allowed to defend his scientific work; the only question was: Had he disobeyed the Church or not?" Further, he observes that "all efforts were bent towards keeping social forces un^er the firm control of a consistent philosophical motivation".3 Finally, Nandy has appealed to the most uncritical chauvinistic sentiments, by asserting that "the attempt to set up science and religion as antagonistic forces in India is entirely derived from Wesrtern