[Alamo-Girl]

No doubt about it, yet their cheerleaders are always in denial when even they know it is true. In fact, that goal is what motivates their secular religion.

Some like Lewontin actually proclaim it, proudly:

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 counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism

Thank you so much for your insights!

[atlaw]

Oh for crying out loud. Where does this compulsion to quote mine come from, and why the desperate need to misrepresent the content of articles and the intentions of authors? Is this the same level of scholarship you bring to your books?

For those who are interested — http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Lewontin_on_materialism