Atheism and the suppression of science, as well as atheism and the rejection of science, is one common criticism of atheism, as militant atheists have often suppressed scientific knowledge because it conflicts with a presupposed materialistic worldview. According to Harold J. Berman, a Harvard specialist in Soviet law, militant atheism was the official religion of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party was the established church. Scientists and party philosophers in the Soviet Union worked to establish a view of science acceptable to Marxist-Leninist philosophy. The League of Militant Atheists worked to introduce anti-religious material in the Soviet education system. In 1929, higher educational institutions were purged of believers and anti-religious departments were established. Furthermore, atheist universities began to be founded, with eighty-four by 1931. Richard Lewontin, a biologist from Harvard University in the New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997 entitled Billions and Billions of Demons (reviewing the book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan) states: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdidy of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravangant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstatiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. Its 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 unitiated. Moreover, that Materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 02:01:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015