ABSTRACT
The men who engaged in such reflection, all of them brilliant and some of them geniuses, provided the raw materials out of which came contemporary social science. Political and social reality is shaped by struggles between social classes over control of the material means of production. Many of them were concerned about the persistence of religion, its ability to survive despite the onslaught of science. Reading Karl Marx's attack on religion as the opiate of the people, one is struck by how "unscientific" it is by the standards of contemporary social science. If science requires the possibility of falsification for verification to become possible then Marx's comments on religion are hardly scientific. The scientist must realize that it is possible that the mystic knows something about reality that is important in the search for truth even though the methods of science cannot attain it.
