Opposition to science is always with us, but Jacques Ellul is a phenomenon of our time and is therefore an item with which I, as an investigator and a teacher, must reckon. The standard reaction, which has been followed by ninety-nine per cent or more of the fraternity, is to respond with the ‘silent treatment’. Anyone who speaks so imprecisely about science and its applications must not be serious. Arguments are tossed off in Ellul's books which have no explicit referents. No knowledgable person can use his own experience, or his capacity for constructing hypothetical experiments, to test the propositions.