The Wind in His Fists

We all have presuppositions and bias… colored glasses through which we view the world. The common conception of science as a purely objective way to examine the world is a myth. There is no way to escape the fact that we cannot view the world apart from our presuppositions.

A speaker at a recent conference alerted me to these two excellent quotes. Richard Lewontin is a Harvard Biologist who writes for the New York Review of Books. In the past I have appreciated his honest and forthright evaluations of science literature. He is unafraid of revealing the weakneses of mainstream scientific views in the name of intellectual integrity and inquiry (he is similar in this respect to Stephen Gould, who was also an honest and thoughtful scientist).

I don’t list these quotes in order to use their own words against them. I have great respect for both of these authors and appreciate their integrity. I include them here because they eloquently articulate the atheistic worldview and give a rare glimpse into the minds of 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 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 this phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to 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 (Lewontin, Richard. 1997. New York Review of Books 44:1. Cited in Budziszewski, J. 2003. What We Cannot Not Know, Spence Publishing, Dallas p. 62f).”

Thomas Nagel is a philosopher whose candid article on the absurdity of life is, I think, a definitive example of atheistic thinking. Here is a quote from another Nagel reference.

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that… My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world (Nagel, Thomas. 1996. The Last Word. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, pp. 130—131; cited in Budziszewski, J. 2003. What We Cannot Not Know, Spence Publishing, Dallas, p. 63).”