Billions and Billions of Demons

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This is the title of Richard Lewontin’s review of Carl Sagan’s book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, published in the NY Times in 1997. You can find the whole review here, and I recommend reading it as he says some very interesting things. One comment on the Trinity near the end I especially liked. But what I have reproduced below is one of his most famous paragraphs. This has been seen by probably most of you, but it is worth revisiting as it really shows us what those of us who do not hold to the materialist worldview are up against. Enjoy!

“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 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.”