Prior commitments:    There are various ways that philosophical presuppositions and faith commitments can enter into views of origins.  Here we are concerned with commitments that are not derived from observational evidence, but made independent of it.  Can you think of any examples of this?
 
 

Dogmatism:    Religious commitments are viewed as dogmatic if they are not held tentatively, but absolutely, as a matter of faith.  Is it possible to hold a commitment to naturalism dogmatically as a matter of faith as well? 
 
 
 
 

Consider the following quotes:

 

"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, New York Review of Books, Jan 9, 1997.
 
 

Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by the independent conviction of their truth as by the terror of what are apparently the only alternatives.  That is, the choice we are tacitly presented with is between a "scientific" approach, as represented by one or another of the current versions of "materialism", and an "unscientific" approach, as represented by Cartesianism or some other traditional religious conception of the mind.

        John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, (Cambridge Mass.:  MIT Press, 1992), pp 3-4.
 
 
 

"Our physics seems inadequate to explain the early times in a way that is consistent with the conditions existing today.  That is a crucial requirement of science - no gaps should exist in the cause and effect chain linking two moments in a physical history.  If our physics fails, understanding on the fundamental level weakens; we have a crisis in science."

S. Hawking, Teachers Guide to Steven Hawking's Universe, pg 9.

 

"Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical experiments run to discover a probable origin of life have failed unequivocally.  Further, new geological evidence may yet indicate a sudden appearance of life on earth.  Finally, we may have explored the universe and found no trace of life, or processes leading to life, elsewhere.  Some scientists might choose to turn to religion for an answer.  Others, myself included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable scientific explanations in the hope of selecting one that was still more likely than the remainder."

     R. Shapiro, "Origins:  A Skeptics guide to the Creation of Life in the Universe",  Penguin, London, p 130, 1986, 1988.
 
 
 
 

"Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd, Nature, 410:(6752): 423, 1999.