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"For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish."
- Austin Farrer
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The Devil's Delusion, by David Berlinski
Written by Larry Taunton
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| Non-fiction |
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I am a secular Jew. My religious education did not take. I can barely remember a word of Hebrew. I cannot pray. I have spent more years than I care to remember in studying mathematics and writing about the sciences. Yet the book that follows is in some sense a defense of religious thought and sentiment. (Berlinksi, p. xi)
I am delighted to have discovered Berlinski. His writing is superb and powerful. Here’s a sample: 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. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society. (Berlinski, p. 26-27) Wow. Berlinski also addresses a question that many of us have asked: why are elements of the scientific community so infatuated with Charles Darwin? There are times, I suspect, when even the most ardent among biologists suspects that enough is enough. The Old Boy is everywhere; he has long since ascended to the Pantheon; schoolchildren hymn his name, and while the man himself seems to have been sober, melancholy, and boring, his admirers have over the past twenty years or so succeeded in suggesting that his effulgence was such that had he been embedded in the ocean floor, sailors might for centuries unerringly navigate by his luster. If Richard Dawkins has not yet proposed renaming various English banknotes in Darwin's favor, this is only because of late he has been too busy counting them. Enough is enough. The effort by Darwinian biologists to promote Darwin is simply explained. Within the English-speaking world, Darwin's theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. No matter the effort made by biologists, the thing continues to elicit the same reaction it has always elicited: You've got to be kidding, right? There is wide appreciation of the fact that if biologists are wrong about Darwin, they are wrong about life, and if they are wrong about life, they are wrong about everything. (Berlinski, p. 186) Ha! This is brilliant stuff. If you have not read this book, you should.
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