Tag: David Berlinski
David Berlinski on The Scientific Embrace of Atheism
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 chemistry Read More ›
Berlinski’s Fingernails Rake Slate: Or, “A Crank’s Progress” across America
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 ›
New Book By David Berlinski Tackles New Atheists Efforts To Hijack Science
The so-called new atheists like Richard Dawkins have hijacked science in an attempt to bolster the foundations of their anti-religious views and in so doing are enshrining a new secular religion of scientism.And now, along comes an agnostic to challenge them.In a refreshing counterpoint, agnostic science writer David Berlinski, an urbane scholar with a withering wit to delight and entertain, vigorously defends religious thought against a movement of intolerance which now includes much of the scientific elite. “If science stands opposed to religion, it is not because of anything contained in either the premises or the conclusions of the great scientific theories,” Berlinski writes. “Confident assertions by scientists that… they have demonstrated that God does not exist have nothing to Read More ›
Council of Europe Makes Its Dogmatism Official: Intelligent Design poses “a threat to human rights” (Part 2)
In Part 1, I discussed the fact that the Council of Europe (CoE) has recently adopted a resolution alleging that intelligent design (ID) is “a threat to human rights.” The CoE resolutions carry no force of law, but regardless, it’s difficult to keep a straight face that these European politicians would let their dogmatism shine so brilliantly that they would label the questioning of Darwinism as a threat to human rights. As mathematician and Parisian David Berlinski stated, “if this is what a threat to human rights amounts to, count me among its supporters; I’m threatening away with the best of them.” It’s also worth noting that only about 7% of the total members of the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly voted Read More ›
David Berlinski’s Letter to Science Regarding “Public Acceptance of Evolution”
David Berlinski submitted the following letter to Science regarding “Public Acceptance of Evolution” (by Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, and Shinji Okamoto, in Science, Vol 313: 765-766, 08-11-06). It appears Science chose not to publish it: Alarmed by the fact that “one in three American adults firmly rejects the concept of evolution,” Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott and Shinji Okamoto have suggested that the source of their disbelief may be found in their religious convictions. But when the authors pass from the concept of evolution to a specific evolutionary claim, those religiously-based objections seem to reflect nothing more than skeptical good sense. “Human beings, as we know them,” Miller, Scott and Okamoto write, “developed from earlier species of Read More ›