"The Real Struggle Between Science and the Supernatural"

From "The Big Picture"

Harvard biologist, Richard Lewontin, speaks frankly about the way in which a prior commitment to materialism functions in much of the scientific community. Refreshing to read such honesty.

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 fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of 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 counterintuitive,
no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

~ “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 7, 1997, 31.