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The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
 
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The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (Hardcover)

de David Berlinski (Author)
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Review

“Berlinski knows his science and wields his rapier deftly. He makes great sport with his opponents, and his readers will surely enjoy it.”
—Tom Bethell, bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science

“A powerful riposte to atheist mockery and cocksure science, and to the sort of philosophy that surrenders to them. David Berlinski proceeds reasonably and calmly to challenge recent scientific theorizing and to expose the unreason from which it presumes to criticize religion.”
—Harvey Mansfield, Professor of Government, Harvard University

“Berlinski’s book is everything desirable: it is idiomatic, profound, brilliantly polemical, amusing, and of course vastly learned. I congratulate him.”
—William F. Buckley Jr.

“With high style and light-hearted disdain, David Berlinski deflates the intellectual pretensions of the scientific atheist crowd. Maybe they can recite the Periodic Table by heart, but the secular Berlinski shows that this doesn’t get them very far in reasoning about much weightier matters.”
—Michael J. Behe, Professor of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University, bestselling author of Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution

“David Berlinski plus any topic equals an extraordinary book.”
—Chicago Tribune


Product Description

Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement–one that now includes much of the scientific community.

“The attack on traditional religious thought,” writes David Berlinski in The Devil’s Delusion, “marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion.”

A secular Jew, Berlinski nonetheless delivers a biting defense of religious thought. An acclaimed author who has spent his career writing about mathematics and the sciences, he turns the scientific community’s cherished skepticism back on itself, daring to ask and answer some rather embarrassing questions:

Has anyone provided a proof of God’s inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.

Berlinski does not dismiss the achievements of western science. The great physical theories, he observes, are among the treasures of the human race. But they do nothing to answer the questions that religion asks, and they fail to offer a coherent description of the cosmos or the methods by which it might be investigated.

This brilliant, incisive, and funny book explores the limits of science and the pretensions of those who insist it can be–indeed must be–the ultimate touchstone for understanding our world and ourselves.
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15 internautes sur 20 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5 Exposing unreason in the Church of Atheism, Oct. 31 2008
Par Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - Voir tous mes commentaires
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
In this entertaining & thought-provoking work, Berlinski exposes the limitations of science and the pretensions of those who insist that it must be the ultimate basis for understanding the universe. As a secular scientist, he argues from a scientific perspective. Being intellectually honest, he admits ignorance as to the big questions but he does reach conclusions from the available information. With acuity and acerbic wit, he reveals flaws in the scientific theories from the scientific point of view.

The author considers the onslaught on religious belief as an attempt to establish science as the single secular religion in which rational people ought to place their faith. Science has made the world more mysterious than ever before, argues Berlinski, since we now know more about what we do not know & have never understood. As science progressed, so did the mysteries that it cannot explain. To mention a few, the following questions have no naturalistic answers: (a) Where existence came from; (b) The origin of life, consciousness & morality; (c) The fine-tuning of the universe that makes human life possible. No convincing answers exist among the plethora of speculation.

Berlinski values the great physical theories as treasures of knowledge while emphasizing that they cannot answer the questions raised by theology and do not offer a coherent view of the universe. By raising apposite issues, he turns the scientific community's skepticism on itself. Does a rigid and oppressive orthodoxy of thought dominate the sciences? Are scientists prepared to believe in anything as long as religious thought is avoided? Did the secular ideologies of the terrible 20th century have an overall beneficial or evil effect? The religion of atheism and its detrimental influence in the scientific community are thoroughly dissected.

The scientist must be open-minded and receptive. Doctrinaire atheists with their closed minds do not necessarily make the best scientists since their preconceptions limit all those ideas not fitting their worldview. Their arguments are often contradictory and hypocritical. For example, they would impetuously demand to know who created God while at the same time insisting that the cosmos manifested itself - never mind their belief in a chain of cause & effect. It is therefore intellectually dishonest of them to ridicule believers for viewing God as existing outside of time. Berlinski succeeds spectacularly in mocking the mockers.

He observes that the common denominator of the most murderous regimes in history was the belief that no Higher Power existed that would hold them to account. Claiming that the oppression & mass murders of the 20th century were overwhelmingly committed by atheists, he carefully connects the dots from Darwin to the Shoah/Holocaust. In this regard, I highly recommend Alain Besançon's A Century of Horrors and Chantal Delsol's Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World.

Being an expert in one field gives certain people the notion that they're qualified to hold forth about subjects far removed from their expertise or to try to extend their own little dung-heaps into all kinds of "unified theories." They know much about little and aspire to become "spokespersons" in the media where they babble fatuously and are treated with deference by the equally vacuous media morons. That is how the Reverend Al Gore's First Church of the Boiling Globe achieved such undeserved prominence.

The author convincingly demonstrates the limitations of science as a method of describing physical reality; when theory goes before experiment, science blinds itself to the important role of faith in all fields of knowledge. An excellent book that investigates this matter in great detail is Science, Faith, and Society by Michael Polanyi. Universally accepted theories have often been proved wrong and there is no divorcing science from society.

Science currently holds the following incompatible doctrines: Quantum theory on the micro level, Relativity theory on the macro, String theory that attempts unification through multidimensionality, Thermodynamics with its process of entropy, Evolution, Molecular Biology & its DNA codes plus the concept of Entanglement that connects quantum entities beyond time and space throughout the universe. Each one offers some insight into some limited area but they do not gel with one another.

A circular argument like the "Anthropic Principle" is proclaimed as an idea superior to that of the Eternal Divine. As explained with admirably empathy & understanding by Delsol in The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, cultures that do not aspire to the divine become seduced by the banal, the depraved & the frivolous, ultimately submitting to the attraction of evil. When lacking a sense of the eternal, science gravitates towards the pursuit of reductionist drivel.

The Devil's Delusion is not always the easiest of reads but Berlinski's sense of humor, his directness and the many appropriate bons mots make it accessible to those with no background in the natural sciences. The book is a most welcome addition to an argument mostly waged by the disciples of atheism on the one hand and the apostles of traditional religion on the other. As such, this work offers a refreshing perspective with arguments firmly rooted in science.
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10 internautes sur 14 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5 Book of the millennium, Nov. 13 2008
Par J. Wayne Eyre (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada) - Voir tous mes commentaires
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
I first read about David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion in the May 5/08 edition of National Review. Just before his recent death, William F. Buckley found the book to be "everything desirable; it is idiomatic, profound, brilliantly polemical, amusing, and of course vastly learned"; and when George Gilder, co-founder of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, declared it "the definitive book of the millennium," I was hooked in to read it.
And oh my, what an incendiary and provocative landmark it turns out to be.
With Baconian pithiness and singular authority, Berlinski--a Princeton Ph.D who has taught mathematics and philosophy at universities in the U.S. and France--pillories the intelligentsia's new-found faith in atheistic scientism as shallow and exclusionary. "Like any militant church," he says, "this one places a familiar demand before all others: Thou shall not have any other gods before me."
Writing as a highly respected member of the scientific élite, Berlinski nevertheless sets out to puncture the conceit that science, as the single belief system that rational humans can place their faith in, is a "narrow and oppressive orthodoxy" that regards religious belief with "frivolous contempt."
To interdict an I-know-where-this-is-coming-from reaction, BerlinskI sets down, on his first page, the "inconvenient fact" that he is "a secular Jew [whose] religious education did not take"--adding, however, that his book is a defence of religious thought and sentiment "because none has been forthcoming." Here, obviously, is a man given to a sense of fair play.
Needlessly, but understandably, BerlinskI, the bestselling author of The Advent of the Algorithm, A Tour of the Calculus, and Newton's Gift, hastens to acknowledge the stupendous advances that have been made in science--"isolated miracles, great mountain peaks," as he calls them. But he repeatedly notes that the profound theories these giants of science have advanced in their respective areas of specialization have made the world and the universe more cryptic, not less.
In the process, he says, the current pantheon of scientists has become more than willing to believe in practically anything: that our universe evolved from an emptier, four-dimensional, mini-universe where space and time as we know it didn't exist; that a universe prior to ours "tunneled through" to become our universe; that achieving ultimate knowledge of our world is best attempted by atomizing elementary particles into their smallest discoverable parts; that life sprang up "on the backs of crystals"; that earthly beings may have been "seeded" by an alien race from another planet.
Anything, in other words, "that will allow physicists to say with quiet pride that they've gotten the thing to appear from nothing, and especially nothing that resembles a deity."
Why are the lab-coated élite so fervent in their New Atheism? Why so intemperate to anyone who strays from the received dogma? Isn't scientific inquiry supposed to be forever open to questioning and investigation? To answer these questions, one has to refer to unbecoming sides of human nature, such as pettiness, dogmatism, hubris, and malice.
A sorry consequence of this closed-mindedness is that most scientists who harbour doubts about the accepted scientific truths are as fearful of going public as was any medieval scholar who questioned geocentrism.
For example, to avoid repercussions for not toeing the line, one biologist (rumoured to be an Ivy League professor) has taken on a pseudonym--Mike Gene--even though his book, The Design Matrix: a Consilience of Clues, neither denies evolution and common ancestry nor claims to offer proof of intelligent design. He's just one of a number of scholars who cite peer-reviewed research to contend that a wholly random explanation for all of creation is, at best, implausible.
Berlinski, meanwhile, like a seasoned courtier scandalously declaring that the emperor has no clothes, audaciously asserts that scientific atheism "has only one stock character in repertoire, and that is the God of the Gaps. Unlike the God of Old, who ruled irritably over everything, the God of the Gaps rules over gaps in argument or evidence."
It's Berlinski's commentary on the paucity of "argument or evidence" in support of classic Darwinianism that constitutes the biggest atom bomb of the book.
"Suspicions about Darwin's theory arise for two reasons," he writes. "The first: the theory makes little sense. The second: it is supported by little evidence...The theories that we do have do what they can do, and then they stop. They do not stop because a detail is missing; they stop because we cannot go on. Difficulties are accommodated by the magician's age-old tactic of misdirection."
Berlinski--who argues that computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not--says the unpersuasiveness of the literature on the subject is well known. He tells how a Nobel laureate once said to him in a faculty lounge: "Darwin? That's just the party line."
In his dissection of Darwinists and Darwinism, Berlinski notes that "if biologists are wrong about Darwin, they are wrong about life, and if they are wrong about life, they are wrong about everything."
Little wonder, then, that so many of them protest their case so much.
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