Not that my good friend GH would say so. Being of the post-modernist persuasion, he would probably rather consign it to a box marked bourgeois factualism or some such, along with fairly much everything else I hold dear. He it was who at a recent social gathering accused me of blind faith in science.
Ironically, this is precisely the quality that actual practitioners of blind faith find me most lacking in. It's often struck me that the best strategy against enemies of reason is to wave all the other enemies at them, and suggest that they try to form some kind of broad front.
Here, then, is my defence of science. It starts with a concession, that there are philosophical problems with any attempt to claim that science is true. The postmodernist version is that meaning is a human construct, so concepts like heat or spin are projections of meaning from the human mind onto the physical universe. I will also admit this.
But it doesn't follow from that admission that science is independent of the physical universe. To demonstrate this, imagine a planet, outside of our solar system, with simple organic life. Let's suppose America, Russia and China each send missions to this planet, in complete isolation from each other. Each mission lands, takes soil samples, and analyses the chemistry of the simple life forms on the planet. Would they come to similar conclusions?
It is clearly apparent that they would, and yet the simple fact of this convergence radically undermines the argument that science is purely a social construct. Such convergence of data from different sources is common in scientific research. One thinks perhaps of dendrochronology (the analysis of past weather patterns from the thickness of tree rings) and the study of ice cores, which yield compatible climate histories. Or of rock dating by fossils, which produces a similar evolutionary time frame to the rate of mutation in haemoglobin molecules. Or of harvest mites.
Of course, you could argue that if an alien ship turned up, from another planet altogether, then they might have a completely different approach. They might have some inconceivable alien alternative to number, to logic, to the whole idea of analysing the world through the projection of meaning onto it.
But so what? Aliens might have, but the people who hypothesise them don't. They're as stuck in the mire as we are, except that their habit of dissing the only worthwhile device we've ever come up with to navigate our way through it forces them to substitute alternatives with the same problem, and no useful solution.
Take for instance the famous postmodern gibberish to the effect that in claiming that e = mc2, scientists are demonstrating a patriarchical obsession with energy, which stands for the male urge to power. Why, in that case, did the experiment measuring light passing near to the sun produce exactly the right result, years after Einstein's death? Scientists claim that e = mc2 because experimental results from a variety of sources support that conclusion.
More tellingly, the argument assumes patriarchy in the same way that relativity assumes time and space. How do we know that women are discriminated against? Because we can produce data that says they are. If it wasn't for the data, the claim would be just that - a claim. Because we can produce evidence, it is more than that.
The real clincher, though, comes in this post from the Neurophilosophy blog about insect-robot interfacing. It's a robot, with a moth in the middle of it. The robot is controlled by a microelectrode inserted into the moth's brain, so that whichever way the moth looks, the robot moves.
In your face, cure for cancer. Imagine having slagged off science, then seeing this come out in the same week. Imagine the tears you'd weep. Tears of joy for the thing in itself (TIP: post-modernists hate it when you talk about the thing in itself), then tears of guilt for your ingratitude and disrespect.
And to be fair, the enemies of science realise the error of their ways. That's why they get on planes.