Our willingness
to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an
understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We
take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure
to fulfil 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 absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in
the door.
Richard Lewontin, in a review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark, published in the New York Review of Books, Jan 9th, 1997.
