Siding with Science

Richard Lewontin, population biologist at Harvard, brilliantly articulates the following in the New York Review of Books:

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 comunity for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. Iti s not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the pehenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are foced 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. Morever, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

After reading through a survey of the Great Books, it is really amazing to step back and see trends and movements in the history of thought. One of the most striking is in the realm of epistemology. The ancient greeks (especially Plato) believed the best way to know something is through reason and not the senses. They recognized that senses are deceptive and cannot be trusted. Many say the great epistemological shift came with Francis Bacon, or the Enlightenment in general. With this shift came the view that one can can only know something certainly through the senses. This is the view we are familiar with today. In our world, if one can't experience something with their five senses, it is not real and is either dismissed as speculation, placed in the realm of "belief" (which is defined as anti-reason) or considered a matter of opinion.

According to Lewontin, though science is proven time and again to not be entirely justifiable through the senses, people today still hold onto it with "religious devotion." Perhaps they are not holding to their own method of knowledge. How ironic.