Amazing admission
Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist (and self-proclaimed Marxist), is certainly
one of the world’s leaders in evolutionary biology. He wrote this very revealing
comment (the italics were in the original). It illustrates the implicit philosophical
bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support
it.
‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its
constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises
of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated
just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept
a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are
forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus
of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter
how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that
materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in
God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that
at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that Miracles may happen.
[but see the difference between origin and
operational science—Ed.]’
Reference
Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons (review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 1997), The New York Review,
p. 31, 9 January 1997.
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