These endless debates about science vs religion, objective vs subjective etc. always remind me of my working life. I was a measurement specialist, working within the consumer products industry. Early in my career I was sent on a course about experimental design and statistics. This course was a complete revelation to me and I understood the significance (geddit?) of the course material immediately and began to apply it as soon as I got back to the lab.

A couple of years later, I lost my job to redundancy and began to look around for another. I was offered the first job that I applied for because that company's Technical Director was looking for someone who understood experimental design and statistics. This director always expressed satisfaction with my work but I was not so lucky with my immediate management and many of my colleagues. I soon realised that they felt threatened by my knowledge and expertise. Many of them seemed to think that writing test methods and analysing test results was a matter of individual 'creativity'. As a result they usually produced over-complicated methods which generated meaningless random numbers. They resented the fact that I usually proved them wrong. What they refused to acknowledge was that working within a rational framework can be just as creative and usually generates meaningful results - complete with probability estimates!

I also realised that it was not all down to individual 'creativity'. In fact I was, as the saying goes, 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. The techniques and concepts that I was using in my day-to-day job had been developed by some of the greatest minds of the last 200 years or so. And these techniques were not just 'technical' and intellectually demanding they were also, at the same time, beautiful and pleasing.

My experience strongly suggests that the rational and the subjective can easily co-exist. This debate is usually framed in terms of rational = narrow and constricting; subjective = FREE (wheee!!!) and broad-minded. It ain't necessarily so!!