DOOR NUMBER ONE? OR DOOR NUMBER TWO?

Billions and billions of demons (Richard Lewontin, January 9, 1997, The New York Review)

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 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.

Mr. Lewontin, with admirable honesty, identifies the most dangerous error that rationalists make, their belief that reason compels reason, that it is sufficient unto itself. In fact, as he acknowledges, reason follows only after one has made a choice of faiths, in this case the faith that the world is entirely material. Having made this choice for oneself, then none of the inconsistencies of reason matter, because one simply assumes that one has not reasoned deeply enough. This is the best of all possible worlds because there must be some rational explanation for everything that happens, and that explantion must ultimately be accessible to man, the creature who reasons. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 30, 2003 2:46 PM