You're not pulling this out-of-context quote again, are you??? Sigh.
This is from a review of Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World. When you look at this quote in context, he is really making the point that one of the difficulty science has in educating people is the fact that some things which are true seem to lack "common sense" to those who don't know science. Nonetheless, they are true. Thus, Lewontin is really saying, is, essentially, that people have difficulty believing in science because they are ignorant of how science works. What he is saying is that the fact that science is "counterintuitive... [and] mystifying to the uninitiated" simply means they don't understand it, and scientists have to do a better job in teaching it.
From the article:
With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn't even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. ...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....
I see this all the time on these boards, when people say, "I don't believe in evolution because it just doesn't make any sense to me..." That something appears to go against common sense is no proof that it is not true.
And Antony Flew really didn't abandon atheism.
And Darwin really didn't mean half of what he wrote.
The quotation is fairly lengthy. It wasn't a sound bite. It wasn't even a sentence. It was an entire paragraph that obviously embarrassed Sagan. So if these men are so brilliant, why can't they say what they mean?