Maverick scientist …

… Rupert Sheldrake Interview | The Best Schools. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

When I was 17, in the gap between leaving school and going to study at Cambridge, I worked as a temporary lab technician in a pharmaceutical laboratory, because I wanted to get some research experience.

What I didn’t know when I took the job was that it was a vivisection facility.Working there made me ask some deep questions about animals, animal suffering, scientific objectivity, and mechanistic attitudes to nature, which were put into practice on a daily basis in this laboratory, which was a kind of death camp for animals.

Scientism is just about the only religion left that has animal sacrifice as its focus of worship.

… the materialist belief-system is self-refuting. If a materialist were consistent, he or she would have to believe that his or her own beliefs were caused by brain activity alone. Materialists’ brains make them believe in materialism.

I made much the same point in my review of Julian Barnes's Nothing To Be Frightened Of.