Michael Behe has an article in the December issue of First Things that illustrates the bondage to materialist philosophy that enthralls contemporary science.
This passage, describing some of the extraordinary reactions that Behe has elicited from antagonistic audiences, is especially remarkable:
Socially acquired materialism often manifests itself by an emotional reaction when challenged. When I lecture in favor of the idea that intelligence is explicitly needed to explain some aspects of biology, the response is not typically, "Gee, that's interesting, but I disagree." Instead, people become angry, denouncing the mildest of challenges to materialism as unspeakable heresy. Once after a lecture in Virginia a student declared she was going to dedicate her life to demonstrating I was wrong.
In Canada an academic ran after me with a loaded rat trap, inviting me to stick my finger in it to see if it worked (I use a mousetrap as an example of the sort of system that can't be made by Darwinian processes). After a lecture to the biochemistry department of a major west-coast university, a group of students I spoke with sullenly agreed that the evidence for Darwinism wasn't there. Nevertheless, they viewed the alternative with contempt and passionately swore to seek a materialistic answer.
At a debate before the Royal Society of Medicine in London, I argued for the incontestable position that science doesn't yet objectively know whether Darwinian processes can explain the human mind, simply because philosophers and neurobiologists don't yet even know what constitutes the human mind. After all, I said, one can't contend that science knows how an undefined entity could be produced by an unspecified process. By a show of hands, about 95 percent of the assembled scientists disagreed. Of course science already "knows" natural selection can explain the human mind-because science already "knows" Darwinian processes explain everything.
Behe's article confirms a point we've made here several times in the past. The attachment people have to their metaphysics is much stronger than the attachment they have to their science. Moreover, what people believe does not depend as much on evidence as it does on what they deeply want to be the case. Most scientists want some materialist explanation for life to be true, and thus their reactions to contrary arguments are as often characterized by irrational outbursts and obstinate denial as they are by reasoned counter-arguments.
Freud alleged that religious belief was nothing more than wish-fulfillment, but surely the same is no less true of materialism.
Behe's whole piece is worth a read.
