David Berlinski is back at NRO with a take down of the odious and tiresome John Derbyshire. Derbyshire has sunk to new lows recently in his attacks on Discovery Institute, Expelled, and anyone who has the temerity to advocate intelligent design or simply question Darwinism. Berlinski is in no mood to pull his punches in going after Derbyshire. Having not seen the documentary that he proposes to criticize, Derbyshire is nonetheless quite certain that he knows what it conveys. “It is pretty plain,” he asserts, “that it is a piece of creationist porn.” Perhaps I will be forgiven for suggesting that John Derbyshire’s late-night scrutiny of the Internet may have corrupted his habitual search for le mot juste. Expelled has Read More ›

David Berlinski has a piece up at Pajamas Media today about the scientific pretensions of today’s leading atheist, who, it turns out, include many of today’s leading scientists. Why is that, wonders Berlinski? It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility. The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg has acknowledged that this is what the great scientists believed: But we know better, he has insisted, because we know more. This prompts the obvious question: Just what have scientists learned that might persuade the rest of us that they know better? It is not, presumably, the Read More ›

Tonight the ever entertaining David Berlinski will continue his cross-country trek presenting his new book The Devil’s Delusion with a stop in Seattle. Even though he seems somewhat charmed with Berlinski, Daniel Engber, writing for Slate, is doing his part in warning America not to be taken in by the professional skeptic. According to Daniel Dennett, Berlinski exudes a “rich comic patina of smug miseducation”; Richard Dawkins implies that he may be wicked to the core; and blogger-ringleader P.Z. Myers has called him a “pompous pimple” and a “supercilious snot.” (Berlinski, for his part, makes no effort whatsoever to remain above the fray; he delivers some colorful rejoinders in the course of this interview he conducted with himself for an Read More ›