An Honest Atheist

By “an honest atheist,” I do not mean that atheists are always being deceptive, but when it comes to the idea of worldviews, the materialist will many times claim that they have reached their conclusion through an unbiased look at the evidence, but this is clearly not the case. All of our interpretation of evidence will be formed by our presuppositions. This is why it was refreshing to read evolutionist, Richard Lewontin’s comment regarding materialism and science. He said…

“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 counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Richard Lewontin “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review (Jan. 9, 1997).

Presuppositions must be addressed when doing apologetics. If you are looking for a good book in how this is done, I recommend “Pushing the Antithesis; The Apologetic Methodology of Greg L. Bahnsen.” I am currently reading through it and will hopefully be offering a few quotes dealing with this topic.

God Bless,

Doug