Johann Hari: New Age drivel and superstition posing as science are threatening our progress

It used to be easy to spot attacks on science. A Southern pastor would wave the Bible and hiccup that he wasn't descended from no monkey. An African village would refuse vaccines, preferring the hallucinatory treatments of the local sage. New Age fortune-tellers would sell their potions in fairgrounds. All would be quickly dismissed by people who could see the fruits of science every time they flicked a light-switch or headed to their GP.

It used to be easy to spot attacks on science. A Southern pastor would wave the Bible and hiccup that he wasn't descended from no monkey. An African village would refuse vaccines, preferring the hallucinatory treatments of the local sage. New Age fortune-tellers would sell their potions in fairgrounds. All would be quickly dismissed by people who could see the fruits of science every time they flicked a light-switch or headed to their GP.

But over the past few decades, the enemies of science have evolved (oh, the irony). Rather than attacking the Enlightenment from the front, pedlars of irrationalist and superstitious theories have begun to claim that their beliefs are simply alternative and equally valid scientific theories. They have adopted the style (but not the techniques) of scientific discourse. Now, they construct fake evidence to meet their preordained religious conclusions - and demand scientific respect for it.

So today, the Southern pastor doesn't wave the Bible; he waves a collection of apparently scientific papers about "Intelligent Design Theory" that claim to prove the world must have been created by a conscious intelligence. The New Age fortune-tellers have a whole section in every pharmacy headed "alternative medicine". And many defenders of the Enlightenment - afraid of falsely being dubbed intolerant - have shut up and accepted it. The result is that global understanding of science is being slowly contaminated.

If you want an example of this new pseudo-science, check out the dismal, brain-rotting new movie What the Bleep Do We Know? which arrives fresh from sleeper-success in the States. Marlee Matlin plays a woman who is having a strange day; she meets a boy who is capable of bizarre physical tricks, and he asks her, "How far down the rabbit-hole do you want to go?"

The film claims to be a serious study of the philosophical implications of quantum physics, and Matlin's story is intercut with interviews from people who seem to be scientists. At first, they simply point out some of the extraordinary things that have emerged from the study of matter at a quantum (sub-molecular) level. But gradually the film begins to stir in unscientific (and absurd) extrapolations from quantum physics. The movie's "scientists" begin to claim that discoveries in quantum physics provide proof for a whole range of fantastical New Age claims. They say you can walk on water if only "you believe it with every fibre of your being".

The real scientist Richard Dawkins summarises the film's assumptions: "Quantum physics is deeply mysterious and incomprehensible. Eastern spirituality is deeply mysterious and incomprehensible. Therefore they must be saying the same thing." Sadly, Dawkins' reaction is an exception; many newspapers have lauded the film as a "brilliant scientific study".

Okay, so it's a dumb movie, you might think, but what harm does it do? On its own, very little. But What the Bleep ... bears all the hallmarks of the new pseudo-sciences. One typical tactic is to take a gap in scientific evidence and fill it with faith-based claims. For example, geologists have discovered a gap in the fossil record which makes it hard to explain how evolution worked at certain periods. The neo-creationists seize on this and claim it as "proof" that evolution didn't happen at all. (Incredibly, over 40 per cent of Americans believe them). The New Agers do the same with the gaps in quantum physics.

In the case of New Age spirituality, little physical harm is done. A few dupes are sold worthless "alternative medicines"; a few gullible people might end up embarrassingly splashing about at the bottom of a river after trying to walk on it. Even in the case of creationism, it's hard to show substantial harm. Some children are cheated of a real scientific education and taught an outright lie, but nobody is dying as a result.

But the failure of defenders of the Enlightenment to stand up against this erosion of science is leading to deaths in some of the poorest countries in the world. Since the 1970s and the rise of postmodernism, it has become popular to view science as a Western, imperialist system, no better or worse than other "indigenous forms of knowledge". Some leaders in developing countries have taken this seriously - and the victims have been their own people. The South African President Thabo Mbeki has enthusiastically picked up this rhetoric, attacking the "hegemony" of Western science and claiming it is "colonialist" to argue HIV causes Aids. He has latched on to a scientist called Peter Duesberg, who says that Aids is caused by poverty and cannot be transmitted by heterosexual sex. The result? Over 70,000 children are now born every year with HIV in South Africa - a great victory over imperialism.

Similarly, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party that governed India from 1998 to 2004 aggressively promoted something called "Vedic science". This claims that all scientific knowledge can be found in the Hindu sacred texts that were revealed "in a flash" over a millennium ago. The best scientific techniques are not experimentation and verification but yoga and meditation. It is, in other words, not science but religion. As a result, India's earthquake prediction systems were steered away from scientific method towards "Vedic" practices. The Department of Health invested millions in the research, development and sale of cow urine as a treatment for TB and Aids.

This injection of multiculturalism and relativism into science has not done any harm to privileged Westerners, who revert to real medicine the moment they get seriously ill. But it has been a disaster for poor countries.

Dawkins has debunked this relativism best, saying simply, "Science works. An African tribe might believe that the moon is an old cooking pot throw up into the sky, but that doesn't get you to the moon. Science does. Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite."

Yet fewer and fewer people seem able to spot the difference between science and pseudo-science. The people who stuff their faces with "alternative medicines" (now available on the NHS in some parts of Britain) are no more scientific than Thabo Mbeki or the BJP. Science-sapping postmodernists have popularised a false equality between sense and nonsense. This has replaced the real equality of all people before the rigours of the scientific method, which is not "Western" - just ask the Arabs who pioneered it, or the tens of millions of people in Africa whose lives have been saved by the scientific eradication of smallpox.

But if we in the developed world cannot resist the rise of New Age drivel and neo-creationism, if even we say it's all relative, what hope do people in more desperate circumstances have against their own anti-scientific charlatans?

j.hari@independent.co.uk