from the skeptiko website:
Benja
The idea that the universe is intelligible (understandable for our reasoning) actually came from the idea that the universe was designed by an intelligent agent. Which is why, there is no coincidence that the first scientists were actually deeply religious (even the moto of Oxford says Dominus Illuminatio Mea (the Lord is my Light)).
"I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite po wer in every atom of its composition." Thomas Jefferson (yes, he didn't like the church anyways).
"What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason." Voltaire (another thinker who hated the church)
“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It d oes not know who or how. It does not understand the the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.” Albert Einstein
"I constantly sought knowledge and truth, and it became my belief that for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge." Alhazen (he made significant contributions to the scientific method, he's the father of controlled testing).
"I had rather believe all the fables in the legends and the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. And therefore, God never wrought miracle, to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it." Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the modern scientific method.
And as I explained before, the idea that proposes that humans are biological robots, which minds are products of natural selection, implicates that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value. Then materialism (according to its own premise), too, was selected for survival, not truth -- which discredits its own claim to truth because it undermines reason, thus it has no logical value. It's a self-contradictory claim.
Besides, materialism is based on determinism, and science has debunked it for like 3/4 of a century through Quantum Mechanics. Michael Shermer is right though: people can believe really bad ideas... but I'm afraid Materialism is one of them as well.
As Kenan Malik, a writer trained in neurobiology, wrote, "If our cognitive capacities were simply evolved dispositions, there would be no way of knowing which of these capacities lead to true beliefs and which to false ones." Thus "to view humans as little more than sophisticated animals (or even robots) ...undermines confidence in the scientific method."