In 1997, in the New York Review of Books, American geneticist and biologist Richard C. Lewontin (1929–2021) offered an oft-quoted explanation of the debt that many scientists of his day felt they owed to materialism:
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 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 absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
“Billions and Billions of Demons,” January 9, 1997
He said this in a review of a book by celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996), The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. (1996).
This famous “Divine Foot in the door” quote comes toward the end of the longform essay. Reading it again at a distance of nearly thirty years, I wonder at the fact that so many people seem to miss the force of the declaration: We must first decide that materialism is true and do science in that context. Thus, science is not — as we often suppose — the light by which we see that we live in a material-only universe; it is the tool that we use to advance that interpretation of our universe.
Further, in writing that science’s materialism is absolute, Lewontin also insisted that science may even demand that we accept claims that are “against common sense.” That is a rather large claim, offered without qualification.
How is his point of view holding up today?
Enter the Snake That Eats Its Own Tail
Lewontin’s comments have generated much discussion over the years. Here I want to focus on the fatal flaw, which neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I talk about in a general way in The Immortal Mind. (2025).
As philosopher Edward Feser points out, the only type of materialism that is philosophically rigorous enough to be a philosophy of science is eliminative materialism: On that view, the human mind does not really exist; it is simply what the brain does, and the brain is a material thing.
But then materialism becomes a snake that eats its own tail. If our minds are simply what our brains do, they cannot establish the truth of any proposition. Thus they cannot establish the truth of eliminative materialism or of any proposition that flows from it.
Science as Indoctrination in Materialism
Let’s look at a couple more brief excerpts:
The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of, for that vast project is, in its entirety, hopeless. Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth. The reason that people do not have a correct view of nature is not that they are ignorant of this or that fact about the material world, but that they look to the wrong sources in their attempt to understand.
Or again:
Sagan’s argument is straightforward. We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities. The vast majority of us do not have control of the intellectual apparatus needed to explain manifest reality in material terms, so in place of scientific (i.e., correct material) explanations, we substitute demons.
In short, the primary purpose of science — as seen here — is not to give us a better sense of the world around us but to indoctrinate us in materialism. For rhetorical advantage, Lewontin refers to non-materialist perspectives in general as belief in imaginary “demons.”
Why Lewontin’s Approach May Be Failing Now
Over the years since then, the human mind — as we discuss it in The Immortal Mind — has simply refused to be materialized. Many phenomena, from the ability of people with split brains to have unified consciousness through near-death experiences where the information learned is later verified.
So here’s the conundrum: If the human mind can be shown to be an illusion created by the material phenomenon of the brain, the pursuit of science is an illusion too. If the human mind is a genuine but immaterial phenomenon, science is saved but materialism is dead. Yes, it’s dead because, remember, “materialism is absolute.” So if it is false is it absolutely dead.
It may take a while for the reality to sink in but we owe Lewontin gratitude for spelling out the terms so clearly.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.