The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
Militant atheism is on the rise. In recent years Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have produced a steady stream of best-selling books denigrating religious belief. These authors are merely the leading edge of a larger movement that includes much of the scientific community.\ In response, mathematician David Berlinski, himself a secular Jew, delivers a biting defense of religious thought. The Devil’s Delusion is a brilliant, incisive, and funny book that...
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Militant atheism is on the rise. In recent years Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have produced a steady stream of best-selling books denigrating religious belief. These authors are merely the leading edge of a larger movement that includes much of the scientific community.In response, mathematician David Berlinski, himself a secular Jew, delivers a biting defense of religious thought. The Devil’s Delusion is a brilliant, incisive, and funny book that explores the limits of science and the pretensions of those who insist it is the ultimate touchstone for understanding our world.
Preface xi\ No Gods Before Me 1\ Nights of Doubt 11\ Horses Do Not Fly 43\ The Cause 63\ The Reason 83\ A Put-up Job 109\ A Curious Proof That God Does Not Exist 137\ Our Inner Ape, a Darling, and the Human Mind 155\ Miracles in Our Time 181\ The Cardinal and His Cathedral 209\ Acknowledgments 227\ Index 229
\ From Barnes & NobleIn this book, the author of Newton's Gift and A Tour of the Calculus asserts provocatively that the scientific claims of post-Darwinist atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are just as muddled as the notions of some proponents of intelligent design. Heterodox and stimulating.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsAn overwrought retort to Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and company. Discovery Institute senior fellow and science writer Berlinski (Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics, 2005, etc.) has a big job on his hands: convincing atheists that science doesn't back their lack of belief. He names names ("I count myself among Harris's warmest detractors"; "Richard Dawkins has nothing but contempt for theology, often glorifying in his impressive ignorance") and protests that while there has never been a worthy proof against the existence of God, there are numerous scientists saying that God is at the very least improbable, at the most a delusion. His counterargument is scattershot, however. There's nothing so elegant as Pascal's theorem to be found in these pages, but instead a lot of rhetoric by sly suggestion: If Noam Chomsky is a child of the Enlightenment, and since the Enlightenment produced the French Revolution, it follows logically that Noam Chomsky is responsible for guillotining the innocent. Since Hitler and Stalin were atheists, it follows that all atheists are mass murderers in fact or potentiality. And so forth. In calmer moments, Berlinski offers a nice tour through modern cosmology, pointing out some of the theoretical weaknesses and built-in conundrums of quantum mechanics, even if it seems to be stretching to claim that Max Born was guilty of "legerdemain." The author seems more comfortable with Einstein's more nondogmatic views, to say nothing of Einstein's willingness, at least publicly, to accept the possibility of God. As for the militant new atheists who deny divine agency in creation, he sometimes gets choked up in his furious rejections: "Scientific atheists should atleast be open to the possibility that scientific explanations by their very nature come to an end well before they have done all the work that an explanation can do."By which, one supposes, he means that a leap of faith is needed in the whole question of whether God exists, which should come as no news to anyone on either side of the question. Those concerned with that question will find better grist elsewhere.\ \
