We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, 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 counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

 

-Richard Lewontin, Naturalistic Evolutionary Biologist

Richard Lewontin, “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997 (a review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).

HT: reasonablefaith.org