One remaining virtue - 25 October 2011 |
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Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, spills the beans on what really motivates the New Atheists:
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 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.
Well, at least it has the virtue of honesty.
Quoted in John C. Lennox’s outstanding book God’s Undertaker (pp. 34-35).
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Minister's Blog