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Evolution Is Religion—Richard Lewontin (1929 – )
Evolutionists typically claim that theirs is the only way of science, and that Intelligent Design theorists deny or twist science to preserve their faith commitments. In a moment of candor, Harvard evolutionist Richard Lewontin, colleague of another famous champion of evolution, the late Stephen Jay Gould, admitted that science is at base quite unscientific. In a 1997 piece for the New York Review of Books, he argued that natural scientists cannot allow “a Divine Foot in the door.”1 His language is academic, but has the ring of religious fervor. Evolutionists exclude the Creator account at the outset, not as a scientific conclusion. Their commitment to materialism is presupposed and nonnegotiable.
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,2 but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori3 adherence to material causes4 to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive,5 no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.6 Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant7 scholar Lewis Beck8 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.9 | 1 |
Impatient with the evolutionists’ pretensions, Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson decided to demonstrate that evolution was not so much science as philosophy, and faulty philosophy at that. In Darwin on Trial and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, he brought his case against materialism, the view that everything is explainable in terms of physical matter and its laws. Johnson often quotes the following statement from Lewontin’s New York Review article. He presents it as a “smoking gun.” See Philip Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 81. See also Phillip Johnson, “The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism,” First Things (November 1997): 22-25, http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3766. | | 2 |
The world of experience. | | 3 |
Prior to or independent of investigation. | | 4 |
Cause and effect, without any supernatural reference points. | | 5 |
Contrary to common sense. | | 6 |
In this context, “those not versed in the physical sciences.” | | 7 |
German Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). | | 8 |
American philosopher and long-time professor at the University of Rochester, Lewis White Beck (1913-1997). | | 9 |
Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” a review of Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997). |
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