Darwinian Fundamentalism
Saturday, April 26th, 2008 : By Hugh Williams
Douglas Groothuis quotes evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin on the evolution-at-all-costs attitude present in much of modern science. Lewontin says,
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 an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Read the rest of Groothuis’s piece for an application of this idea to Richard Dawkins’s stultifying performance in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he admitted that life on Earth may well have come from aliens.
About The Author
Hugh Williams is one of the Adult Bible Study teachers at Grace Fellowship and is also one of the webmasters for the forGodsfame.org website. You may notice him playing bass with the music team on Sunday mornings, too, when he works hard on smiling while reading music and keeping rhythm at the same time. A native of the New York City area, Hugh and his wife, Krista, have lived in the Atlanta area since 1997.
More entries by Hugh Williams
