We began from the now popular idea that science, like theology, and indeed like most other ways of knowing, is really in the business of telling stories about the world. As we have seen, such a notion has passed from shocking to respectable, and finally to cliché, in a relatively short period in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A millennium article by the veteran Jesuit, Walter J. Ong, cites a whole clutch of recent publications dealing with science and religion as ‘stories’ of the universe. There are, however, dangers in such a dramatic reinstatement of narrative as, if not ‘queen of the sciences’, at least a kind of quasi-omniscient Jeeves-like lab assistant.

It is not the danger of reducing all knowledge to a single medium. That term ‘reducing’ is a weasel-word. Anyone who has read so far should be aware that so far from there being any reduction in such a highly unlikely consilience, there is a considerable enhancement of our understanding of the world in recognizing the part played by narrative in every description of it – and no less in analysing such narratives with the techniques and insights created by the professionals: literary critics and their ilk. Nor is it the danger of claiming (like Rorty) that narrative is all there is. Such an over-simplification is as crude as the assumption that all words correspond to real entities; both are patently self-defeating.