The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions

Review of The Devil's Delusion by David BerlinskiThe pseudo-religion of atheistic scientism that Berlinski exposes in the Devil's Delusion reflects the tendency of scientists to become what Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called "barbarians of specialization." Knowing much about one thing gives them confidence to pontificate grandly about other subjects on which their expertise is irrelevant, or to inflate their own little patches of expertise into "grand unified theories." Knowing more and more about less and less, they finally rise into the nation's TV airhead empyrean chattering vacuously about anything and everything like George Clooney or Al Gore, Carl Sagan or James Watson, Richard Dreyfuss or Steven Weinberg--actors, politicians, scientists...in the giddy glow of the tube who can tell them apart in their common babble of moral relativism and anti-capitalist eschatology?The supreme pontiff of the new religion is Richard Dawkins, an Oxford biologist who rode high on the best-seller lists for months with a book entitled The God Delusion. Venerated by the media for his alleged scientific genius, he can say almost anything and no one seems to laugh or scoff. For example, The New York Times Book Review late last year published Dawkins' shockingly inept essay on Michael Behe's new book on the limits of Darwinism, despite Dawkins' undisguised personal bile and his amazing idea that the case for the Darwinian origin of new species is aided by invoking a "baying chorus" of the many diverse breeds of dogs.Now Dawkins has met his nemesis in Berlinski, a Princeton PhD, secular Jew, and a former fellow at the Institute des Hautes Scientifique in France. Now with the Discovery Institute, Berlinski commands a range of scientific disciplines and philosophical skills that project him well beyond the camp of Ortega's barbarians. The polymathic author of several formidable books on mathematics and logic, he in recent years has written a series of incandescent essays on biology, physics, psychology, and mathematics in Commentary magazine that have subsequently evoked an overflow of dumbfounded responses in its letters pages (Berlinski's replies are feloniously sharp). The Devil's Delusion makes the compelling argument that the anti-God fetish of modern science has driven many scientists into a mad nihilism that has crippled their scientific work as well.Detailing the horrendous record of massacres and holocausts committed by aggressive atheists during the 20th century, Berlinski observes "what anyone capable of reading the German sources already knew: A sinister current of influence ran from Darwin's theory of evolution to Hitler's policy of extermination." An implicit syllogism underlies all these horrors--A: "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted." B: "If science is true, then God does not exist." C: If science is true, then everything is permitted." As Berlinski shows, these propositions led predictably (Dostoyevski and Nietsche predicted them after all) to the holocaust.After demonstrating the moral obtuseness of atheist science, The Devil's Delusion goes on to castigate its crippling limitations even as a means of explaining physical reality. Ignoring the hierarchical structure of the universe, with the concept preceding the concrete, the algorithm preceding the computer, the DNA word preceding the flesh, and theory preceding experiment, science has blinded itself to the indispensable role of faith in all forms of knowledge. In Berlinski's view, there is a crucial point of convergence between moral laws and physical laws: "In both cases we do not know why the laws are true but we can sense that the question hides a profound mystery." Science, as Berlinski avers, is "everywhere saturated with faith."A complacent sciolist atheism, though, distracts science from the reality of its own necessary religious and hierarchical assumptions. Science does not harbor the slightest idea of "how the ordered physical, moral, mental, aesthetic, social world in which [we] live could have ever arisen from the seething anarchy of the world of particle physics." The so-called "standard model" seems to supply "as many elementary particles as there is funding to find them" while offering scant support for the reductionist assumption that the world is best understood by atomization into its smallest possible parts.Beyond reductionism, science offers at least six mostly incompatible theories of reality: Quantum theory focused on subatomic elements, Relativity Theory spanning the universe, String theory seeking a grand unification in multidimensional infinitesimals, Thermodynamics with its arrow of time and slope of entropic decline, Evolution in its grand bottom-up materialist ascent, molecular biology with its top-down DNA codes, and the macro-quantum concept of Entanglement which links quantum entities across the cosmos beyond conventional time and space. Each theory offers stunning insights into some limited domain but fails to fit with the neighboring regimes.Eroding the coherence of the entire set is the self-defeating character of the underlying materialism: a theory that denies the significance of theories and theorists and ignores the non-material abstractions on which it relies. All the incompatible physical systems of modern science ultimately repose on a foundation of mathematical logic. Finally making a hash of all atheist materialism, therefore, is the paramount mathematical finding of the 20th century: the inexorable Godelian incompleteness of mathematics. As Kurt Godel, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, and Gregory Chaitin have proven, mathematical logic, whether expressed in computer algorithms or differential equations, finally relies on premises beyond itself. In other words, faith is critical to mathematics and computer logic, which are themselves abstract conceptual schemes not in any way reducible to materialist dogma.Apparently to distract attention from this baffling paradox of atheism, scientists have clutched at a set of laughable chimeras. Dawkins, for example, accepts the idea of a "megaverse," a stupendous "Landscape" of infinitely parallel universes that explain away the absurd improbabilities of Darwinian materialism by the assumption that our own universe is only one of an infinite array. As Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg sums up the argument in a transparent tautology preening as science, "Any scientist must live in a part of the megaverse where physical parameters take values suitable for the appearance of life and its evolution into scientists." Other physical parameters are presumed to hold in other universes that don't harbor life.This stupendous circularity is called the Anthropic Principle and is touted as an explanation of the universe superior to the idea of God. As Dawkins puts it, "Better many worlds than one god." Berlinski concludes, Dawkins' favored "Landscape and the Anthropic principle represent the moral relativism of physical thought." Since moral relativism is the goal of nearly all academic ethical and political philosophizing, this outcome is entirely predictable despite its devastating impact on the truth claims of science.Berlinski concludes that "the willingness of physical scientists to explore such strategies in thought might suggest to a perceptive psychoanalyst a desire not so much to discover a new idea as to avoid an old one." But the idea of a God in a hierarchichal universe is essential to coherent thought or uplifting culture of any kind.A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial, from the fetishes of pornstars to Hollywood's Hitman of the Month. Without a sense of the transcendent, science ends up pursuing reductionist trivia, from the next particle or dimension of string to ever more abstruse arguments for the animality of man and the pointlessness of the Universe.The scientific community remains oblivious to its own philosophical inanity chiefly because of its insularity and defensiveness, protected by a trumpery of "peer review" and immunity to outside criticism. The public has tended to go along with the scam because of modern science's alleged relation to engineering and technology. Dawkins and his ally Daniel Dennett both declare, in the spirit of the common claim of "no atheists in foxholes," that there are no devout believers on airplanes. Anyone undertaking a journey by air, they say, is staking his life on the validity and reliability of modern science. Few travelers indeed would find solace if glancing into the cockpit as they boarded their plane they saw the pilot praying, rather than scrutinizing his instruments.Based on top-down engineering and intelligent design, however, the sciences that enable modern flight have nothing in common with the pastiche of atheist materialism and moral relativism that Dawkins and Dennett uphold. Navier-Stokes flow equations, advanced materials science, solid state physics, molecular chemistry, and computer design, among a host of real scientific disciplines, are expressions not of bottom-up random processes but of hierarchical planning in which the ideas and schematics precede their physical embodiment. Through most of the history of science, from Michael Faraday to Enrico Fermi, its protagonists were masters of the technology of their day. They built the apparatus that tested their concepts and embodied their theories. Science and engineering were cognate disciplines.Beginning with Einstein, however, scientists reached for a new role as free-floating philosophical gurus and theological prophets. Only Einstein himself and Richard Feynman were capable of fulfilling this mission at all. Seeking grand theories, essentially theologies, that could unify all the conflicting schemes of physical science, even Einstein and Feynman came to recognize the futility of their quest. But their Lilliputian followers continued the search in ever diminishing circles of tautological nonsense, arriving at the end at Darwinian loops of survival of the fittest as an explanation for all that exists.In the end turning against real science itself, the pages of Scientific American succumbed to what Berlinski terms a "simian gabble of academic life," full of theological speculations, infiniverses, and political campaigns such as "climate change" paranoia that are hostile to the advance of technology and engineering science.Berlinski's Devil's Delusion is a promethean work that clears away this debris. It is the definitive book of the new millennium, when science is widely learning that the opaque materialist dogmas of the Twentieth Century are irrelevant to true science, where each new discovery opens new horizons of theory and new degrees of freedom and challenges of faith.George Gilder

In the documentary movie Expelled by Ben Stein, one of those interviewed was David Berlinski, author of the book under review, for his assessment of evolution, intelligent design, and the dogmatic opposition to any criticism of Darwinism by the scientific establishment. As far as I know, this book is Berlinski's first book-length criticism of Darwinism and especially of what has come to be known as scientism (the atheistic religion that pretends that it is based on science). The interesting title of Berlinski's book comes from an amalgamation of Richard Dawkins' book  The God Delusion , McGrath's response  The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine , and another book by Dawkins titled  A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love . Berlinski describes himself as a "secular Jew," and says that his "religious education did not take. I can barely remember a word of Hebrew. I cannot pray." Although he does not, to my knowledge, say he is an agnostic, it seems that that must be what he is. He has a Ph.D. from Princeton University and has taught mathematics and philosophy at universities in the United States and in France. He has written math and science books such as  A Tour of the Calculus , The Advent of the Algorithm: The 300-Year Journey from an Idea to the Computer , and  Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World . In approaching what may well be the most controversial and defining topic of our time, I suppose that one of two approaches can be taken. One would be a serious presentation of the scientific facts and attempting to reason with those who are opposed to your point of view. The other approach may well be to ridicule your opponents, call them stupid, and make sport of the issue. Berlinski has chosen the latter approach. However, after calling them stupid, he gives detailed rationale as to why the charge is appropriate. In a sense I suppose he combines the two approaches. His dry humor is throughout the book that could not be pulled off by anyone of lesser brilliance, but shines more brightly in some sections. Here and there his humor evokes out-loud laughter from the reader, although no doubt that depends somewhat on the reader's worldview. Berlinski takes them all on by name and pulls no punches. He seems to take great delight in pointing out their errors of logic, their incorrect scientific facts, their gross extrapolations, their superficial understanding of science, the absurdities of what they actually profess to believe, and their lack of humility before the mysteries of life. For an agnostic, if that is what he is, he seems to have admiration for theologians and others who struggle to make sense of life, and surprisingly, and delightfully to me, he quotes Scripture to make some of his points. A strange prophet he, but then God can obtain praise from the rocks if it please Him to do so.The book has ten chapters. The chapter titles are as follows: Chapter 1. No Gods Before Me, 2. Nights of Doubt, 3. Horses Do Not Fly, 4. The Cause, 5. The Reason, 6. A Put-up Job, 7. A Curious Proof That God Does Not Exist, 8. Our Inner Ape, a Darling, and the Human Mind, 9. Miracles in Our Time, and 10. The Cardinal and His Cathedral.The first major area that Berlinski addresses is the criticism that is often made of religious people. When Sam Harris and others point out the human suffering that has occurred at the hands of religious leaders, Berlinski agrees fully. However, to leave it there as though something significant has been said raises more questions than it answers. He describes Harris' book  Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage)  as "devoid of any intellectual substance whatsoever." Berlinski elaborates: "A great deal of human suffering has been caused by religious fanaticism. If the Inquisition no longer has the power to compel our indignation, the Moslem world often seems quite prepared to carry the burden of exuberant depravity in its place. Nonetheless, there is this awkward fact: The twentieth century was not an age of faith, and it was awful. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot will never be counted among the religious leaders of mankind." He then lists for us 63 wars that took place during the 20th century with the number of those killed in each. The numbers are staggering: 15 million in WWI, 55 million in WWII, 20 million under Stalin, 40 million under Mao, etc. This sort of information, of course, does not justify religious intolerance of any kind, but it certainly does help to put things into perspective, and completely counters any suggestion that the world would be safe and secure if we could just get rid of religion, as at least implied by, if not actually stated, by the likes of Harris, Dawkins, etc. Not only in terms of wars, but other writers such as Steven Pinker make claims about how much better the world is now as a result of modernity. Berlinski exclaims "The good news is unrelenting . . . In considering Pinker's assessment of the times in which we live, the only conclusion one can profitably draw is that such an excess of stupidity is not often to be found in nature." "What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing."Another area that Berlinski addresses is the way philosophical "proofs" for the existence of God are dismissed by atheists. He has a great deal of admiration for Aquinas, and summarizes his cosmological argument (not "proof") for the existence of God. Before dismissing someone who wrote so long ago, consider Berlinski's words: "His life coincided with a period of great brilliance in European art, architecture, law, poetry, philosophy, and theology. Commentators who today talk of the dark ages, when faith instead of reason was said ruthlessly to rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance." The cosmological argument is simply that the universe has a cause. Many, apparently, think it has no cause or purpose. That flies in the face of common sense, even the common sense of a child, but nonetheless it is held. But then Berlinski goes on to argue how the philosophical cosmological argument has been greatly bolstered from the "very place one might least expect it to appear: contemporary physical cosmology." Berlinski reviews the findings of the "Big Bang" theory and other modern discoveries that Aquinas knew nothing of but strongly supports the cosmological argument for the existence of God. "If nothing else, the facts of Big Bang cosmology indicate that one objection to the argument that Thomas Aquinas offered is empirically unfounded: Causes in nature do come to an end. If science has shown that God does not exist, it has not been by appealing to Big Bang cosmology. The hypothesis of God's existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent." He then delightfully quotes from modern scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, who have not overlooked the religious significance of these modern scientific discoveries. For example, "`So long as the universe had a beginning,' Stephen Hawking has written, `we could suppose it had a creator.'" For another example, "`The best data we have concerning the big bang,' the Nobel laureate Arno Penzias remarked, `are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.'" If some atheists want to dismiss such things, it is only because they have no real response to give. Berlinski presents the best arguments from philosophy and from science for the existence of God that I have read.Berlinski's criticism of Darwinian evolution of humans is brutal: "It is rather more difficult to take what no one doubts and fashion it into an effective defense of the thesis that human beings are nothing but the living record of an extended evolutionary process. That requires a disciplined commitment to a point of view that owes nothing to the sciences, however loosely construed, and astonishingly little to the evidence." Of course, there are many who may require some convincing, so just saying that evolution has little evidence in its support won't do the job. But arguments there are a plenty. "Darwinian biologists are very often persuaded that there is a conspiracy afoot to make them look foolish. In this they are correct." "Suspicions about Darwin's theory arise for two reasons. The first: the theory makes little sense. The second: it is supported by little evidence." Okay, no argument presented here. You'll have to read this book, as well as perhaps some others, if you want the details.Putting words in God's mouth and sounding like a passage from Job, Berlinski writes "You have no idea whatsoever how the ordered physical, moral, mental, aesthetic, and social world in which you live could have ever arisen from the seething anarchy of the elementary particles." This is a delightful book to read, especially so since it comes from a somewhat unexpected source.

Really enjoyed reading the book. Berlinski lays bear all the weak arguments that Atheism is based. Also, the tremendous intolerance that Atheists show towards any idea that doesn't agree with theirs. "The same people who complained about the Inquisition and witches being burned at the stake were now enjoying a little heresy hunting of their own. The advocates of tolerance were not themselves very tolerant. And, apparently, religious zealots don’t have a monopoly on dogmatism, incivility, fanaticism, and paranoia." (from There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese)

Eigentlich ist das ein staubtrockenes Philiosophie Thema. Über Gottesbeweise gibt es ganze Bibliotheken sehr ernsthafter und kluger Bücher. Normalerweise schläft man nach 10 Seiten ein. Wer hätte gedacht, dass man darüber ein humorvolles Buch schreiben kann, das trotzdem analytische Schärfe und philiosophische Reflektion bietet? Es macht Spaß dieses Buch zu lesen und sich zu amüsieren und erst im Nachhinein, oder beim 2. Lesen die Tiefen der Argumentation zu erfahren. Berlinski schreibt dieses Buch als Gegenposition zu der Behauptung atheistischer Autoren, dass die Wissenschaft die Nichtexistenz Gottes bewiesen hätte. Er nimmt schon aus akademischem Widerspruchsgeist die gegensätzliche Position ein weil eben diesem atheistischen Anspruch nicht genug widersprochen wird. Dabei setzt er Ironie und Sarkasmus bewußt provokativ und unterhaltend ein. Wenn sie sich also dafür interessieren und mal etwas humorvolles zu einem ansonsten eher trockenen Thema lesen wollen, so sind sie hier genau richtig. Nun ja, man muss allerdings Englisch können. Aber vielleicht findet sich ja auch nochmal jemand der sich traut es ins Deutsche zu übersetzen.

This author is very interesting. This book is the result of that. Do the new atheists even know logic? I do not think so.

A difficult topic which has defeated many, but David Berlinski manages to hold his place at the end of the joust. A serious topic handled adroitly with understated wit but serious intent.

David Berlinski writes from within the academic world. He recounts what it takes to become "baptised" into the community of scientists with their dogma and rituals. He points out the hypocrisy of those scientists who put blind faith in naturalism (with all its countless problems), who have done so without questioning seriously the truth of its tenets. He ultimately shows the absolute absurdity of atheism and its laughable scientific pretensions,This is a wonderful and eminently readable book. Berlinski discusses the many ridiculous assertions made by prominent atheists such as Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, Pinker and others - and shows their arguments to be utter nonsense. At a time when logical discourse has devolved so much with the advent new atheism, there really needed to be a voice of reason. Berlinski is that man. It's a short book, because any real consideration of atheist arguments only requires a short and thoughtful reply. The thing is that atheists are speaking to the choir - they use mere assertion and emotive language rather than argument. This just doesn't do much for thoughtful people - but due to the serious absurdity of the position needs to be countered!This is a great book. But more significantly, this is a necessary book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. This subject matter is deep and yet the writing is very casual, something you can enjoy reading with a nice coffee.