If evolution is not true, do you want me to go to the outback of my country and accept the myths of the Australian Aboriginals? Were the ancient Egyptians correct? Or the Romans? Or the Indians? You open a veritable Pandora's Box if you wanted to accept supernatural mysticism. I live in a country that is proud of its scientific achievements.Doug,
This is the exact argument that my family members used when I presented them with the demonstrably false claims of the Watchtower. At some point they just throw their hands up in the air and say like, "well where else could we go, back to the filthy teachings of Babylon the Great"?
A lot of JW's know there are giant holes in their theology, but they just can't bring themselves to separate from it. After all there is really nothing else right?
Geneticist Richard Lewontin sums up a priori thinking well:
"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."