The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions | 
| Author: David Berlinski
Publisher: Crown Forum
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 610
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.1
ISBN: 0307396266
Dewey Decimal Number: 215
EAN: 9780307396266
ASIN: 0307396266
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Disappointing - reads like Anne Coulter May 2, 2008
1 out of 15 found this review helpful
I found this book very disappointing with its combination of ad hominem arguments and misstatements of current scientific theory. Clearly a believer in the "god of the gaps", the author likes to point out incompleteness of scientific theories which encroach upon superstition (usual suspects). One could imagine his using the same rhetoric to reject Copernican theory or continental drift if he lived in an earlier time.
What this book misses is the real dogma of scientific thought - with our without atheism. Scientists "believe" that we humans can observe the world and figure it out. Theists explain the world through authority. The difference is that science produces theories of predictive value, which religion does not. An analysis of this devil's delusion would have made a much better book.
 Berlinski 10, Dawkins 0 May 2, 2008
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
I was fortunate witness to a live performance of David Berlinski talking about his book, The Devil's Delusion, in Seattle. His wit and intellect in person was also vibrant on ink and paper. Berlinski has a clear understanding of science and science history that blends well to the reader to understand the current militant atheists attack. Many times he outright skewers his opponents with his pen. "The pen is mightier than the sword"- Edward Bulwer-Lytton I found this book both educational as well as entertaining. I would pay good money to see him debate Dawkins. He would have Dawkins shaking with frustration as he did in Seattle by a lone Dawkins wannabe in the question and answer section of his talk.
Darwinist Atheist, we are watching you and not taking everything you say as "truth" anymore.
A favorable review by a fellow-Jew May 1, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This reviewer is delighted by the book, but not at all because it is by a fellow-Jew. I can be as much a critic of Jewish authors as of any. My attention to the ethnicity (or whatever classification is deemed applicable) is owing to the author's extensive consideration of the Holocaust in relation to his subject matter. He naturally feels closely tied to those events, and I am still closer. I am a survivor, and while I almost never bring up the matter in my reviews here, I feel it now appropriate for the same connections brought up in the book.
The connections are with theism and morality, a principal corresponding discussant addressed in the book being Sam Harris, an author of apparently likewise a Jewish background but to whom I am in greatest opposition. Dr. Berlinski notes (p.29): "the SS took a perverse satisfaction in assuring one another that whatever they had done, it would not be believed, and if believed, blame would be assigned to their victims". And regarding the last he quotes Harris: "The ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod of intolerance to this day"; and (through p.30): "Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity, as any other religion". Dr. Berlinski responds beautifully, with regard to "cattle cars [that] deposit their famished, suffering victims at German extermination camps. Some insight. Some modernity. Some civilization."
Harris's contentions are made to fit his anti-religion and are not based on any facts he may trouble himself to examine. Only a small part of European Jewry was religious, and Jews were more inclined toward modernity than were others. I might mention, to Harris's likely dismay, that the small minority of devoutly religious victims among us bore the events with incomparably greater serenity than did others.
Another of his passages quoted by Dr. Berlinski is (p.30): "It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of...God. If having half of your people delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could."
This abusively degrading passage is again misrepresentative of the issues. Again, "most Jews" were not believers. But more regarding Harris's depth of reasoning, no believer thinks in that shallow manner: "an all-powerful God is looking out for [one's] interests". Everyone knows that life is not without hardship, faith involving what the term connotes, trust in ultimate redemption.
Leaving that offensive author behind and returning to Dr. Berlinski observing that the SS assured one another that what they did would not be believed, we have the confirmation in Holocaust denial. Further, personally I have run into doubters of my story all my life. Only recently a teacher wrote me for information on my stay in Gunskirchen camp, from which I was liberated by the U.S. military (I have a website that includes a limited autobiography). The teacher had a relative in that military, and remarked in his communication that we were in the camp fed by the Germans some soup. I answered we weren't fed any, and I haven't heard from him since. Evidently he thought I was untruthful, although had I been pretending, I would have not contradicted him.
This is only one episode in my experience that listeners will hold on to their doubts or persuasions regardless of evidence or reason.
In a wider setting, this also holds for disputes concerning what constitutes knowledge in sciences and outside them. In particular the concern here is the entrenched position of Darwinism, but I also see other accepted claims as deserving scrutiny, my serious consideration of much of this presented in On Proof for Existence of God, and Other Reflective Inquiries. Dr. Berlinski of course is one of those who challenge Darwinism, for which he has me as supporter. I do not agree with him on everything, however. For instance, he places great weight on the Cosmological Argument (Chapter 4), which posits a First Cause identified with God. But a First Cause is insufficient for such identification. Mankind does not only seek in a Supreme Being a cause of the universe, but an administrator to human needs.
There are other views by Dr. Berlinski that I question, in general his unquestioning acceptance of most of recent fundamental scientific pronouncements. Or specifically such as inclusion of Goedel, whose claims along with others I find scandalous mistakes, among four listed very greatest scientists (p.207). But on the whole the book is wonderfully written and refreshing, contrasted with many other current writings.
what a treasure he is April 29, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
As always, Berlinski is pure delight for the intellect - profound, hilarious, amazing. In a class by himself. I love Berlinski, that's all there is to it.
 Like Socrates, Berlinski knows he doesn't know. April 25, 2008
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I love writers who make me laugh and think at the same time, and have long enjoyed Berlinski's rapier wit, not having ever served as its target. At first here, however, he seemed to pummel the reader with almost too many aphorisms and clever punch-lines. This sort of joke is only funny if one is sure the author knows what he's talking about, and Berlinski's minimalist approach to evidence (is that French influence peaking through?) seemed to leave room for doubt. His Commentary articles on, say, the origin of life, are far more detailed than his discussion of the same subject here. But laughing my way through this rather brilliant little book, I came to appreciate Berlinski's austerity. He uses details to illustrate, not prove, just as the Song painter called "One Corner Ma" used empty canvass to project space and grandeur onto the viewer's imagination.
Fritz Ward has described the contents of the book well. Let me just add a few sample comments:
"Western science is above all the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
I make a similar point in my own The Truth Behind the New Atheism: Responding to the Emerging Challenges to God and Christianity, and in an anthology of what great Christian thinkers have said about the subject on my web site. Faith in the Christian sense is part of a continuum of rational belief, which underlies all rational epistemologies. Science is a very valuable, but not uniquely valuable, means of finding certain kinds of truth; all of which depend ultimately on rational trust.
"What is essential is not what has been distilled but what has evaporated. That is, everything of interest in the Iliad."
"We who are heirs to the scientific tradition have been given the priceless gift of a vastly enhanced sense of the miraculous."
Here I disagree slightly with Dr. Berlinski. The laws of nature, as uncovered by properly amazed scientists, do indeed add to our feeling for the remarkable and mysterious character of creation. But the miracles of Jesus (to give the best example) do the same thing, I think, in a similar way. That is to say, miracles are not a part of Nature, but reflect the character of Nature's Creator in a way that compliments what we can know of Him through Nature.
Read Berlinski, and enjoy him. But be aware of the limits he places on inquiry -- roughly the limits of that particular, limited epistemology called science. (As does another equally excellent response to Dawkins & Co, by John Lennox.)
A broader approach might answer some of the arguments made by one intelligent hostile reviewer below. I try to offer this, in some of my books. (On the shoulders of greater writers like Pascal, Chesterton, Lewis, Wright, and others.) Over the past few weeks, I've been planning a book that will integrate more fields of knowledge, within a Christian framework of science and history -- an answer to AN Wilson's Consilience, by means of a Christian story of the universe.
Pasteur said, "The more I know, the more does my faith approach that of a Breton peasant." Berlinski begins to show -- with wit and insight -- that this is also a rational response to more recent growth in knowledge.
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