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 absufdity 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 comunity for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. it is not that the methods and insitutions of science somehow compel us to acept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to matyerial causes to create an aparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. Richard Charles Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons - January 9, 1997 Issue. Richard Charles Lewontin (March 29, 1929 â July 4, 2021) was an American evolutionary biologist, mathematician, geneticist, and social commentator.