David Berlinski

More than a thousand people attended the second day of the Legacy of Darwin ID Conference this weekend in Castle Rock, Colorado. Saturday morning started off with a strong talk by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who synthesized the main points of his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. Behe, in his usual winsome and accessible style, drove home just how much empirical evidence has accumulated in recent years demonstrating the sharp limits to the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutations.

During the question period that followed, two people offered long-winded “questions” to Behe that seemed to come straight from the talking points of the National Center for Science Education.

Updated photo from Friday night: Castle Rock, Colorado — Despite the first major snowstorm of the season, and unrelenting efforts by malicious Darwinists to prevent people from registering, a huge crowd of around 1,000 people showed up Friday night to hear Dr. Stephen Meyer present the DNA evidence for intelligent design based on his new book Signature in the Cell. Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and myself are in Colorado to speak at the Legacy of Darwin ID Conference sponsored by Shepherd Project Ministries. On Saturday, Michael Behe will present the evidence against modern Darwinism from his books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution; David Berlinski will talk about The Devil’s Delusion and The Deniable Darwin; and I Read More ›

Tuesday night at the Beverly Hills Library, with David Berlinski debating an atheist before a mixed crowd of friends and foes of religion, I experienced a lifetime first.

As a journalist writing about people and events, I’ve often had occasion to change or withhold someone’s name or otherwise disguise his identity. Almost always this is because the person in question never asked to be part of my story, is not a public personality and never sought to be, did nothing seriously blameworthy, but would be embarrassed by having his words or actions reported in public. So I don’t identify him. On Tuesday, listening to the debate, for the very first time in my experience I encountered a situation where someone was indeed seeking to make a name for himself but I felt nevertheless it would be cruel to give his name or institutional affiliation in my account of the event.

David Berlinski’s atheist opponent is that person. The poor guy! He was so hopelessly outgunned and outmanned as a thinker, debater, and speaker that I just can’t bring myself to give you his identity. He probably has his name on a Google Alert. Who doesn’t? Even it was entirely his free choice to put himself up again Berlinski in defense of his non-belief, I don’t have the heart to worsen his embarrassment.

The debate was sponsored by the tireless and infectiously enthusiastic Avi Davis of American Freedom Alliance. Dr. Berlinski spoke first and was, as ever, amazingly eloquent. He began by reframing what’s called the “Darwin debate” as something different. Rather than opposing sides in a conflict, for or against “Western civilization,” he generously portrayed the difference of views as an argument between passengers in a lifeboat on the open seas. Our civilization is a sinking boat on the ocean. We’re all, atheists, agnostics, and believers, trying to bail out the sorry craft. The argument is over how best to save all of us. There are no enemies here.

Berlinski went on to summarize Thomas Aquinas’ strong case for atheism and Aquinas’ own reply to that case. He spoke of the mysteries of existence, the origin of the universe, or matter and life, hardly stressing the case against Darwin at all. Afterward, in the Q&A, a questioner addressed him with hesitation: “Mr. Berlinski, you’re so eloquent it makes me pause before expressing myself publicly to you.”

Then the opponent got up. “I didn’t know we’d be talking about the origin of the universe,” he explained. “I would have studied more!”

After having the premier of Darwin’s Dilemma canceled by the California Science Center, Avi Davis’s American Freedom Alliance really pulled things together in heroic fashion in Los Angeles. The AFA found a new venue, hardly inferior, where academic freedom may be less endangered: the University of Southern California. The sizable crowd on Sunday night of about 230 people was appreciative and intelligent. There were university students representing both sides of the Darwin debate, high school students from a church school in Santa Monica on a field trip, and a mix of other folks from the community.

The film is a powerful document. The word that came to my mind watching it was “spooky.” Besides very lucidly and compellingly laying out its scientific case that the Cambrian explosion can’t be remotely explained in Darwinian terms, and that the event 530 million years ago virtually compels a conclusion that purposive design was involved, I was struck by the atmosphere of mystery that director Lad Allen evokes. What does explain the sudden appearance of most animal body plans in a space of maybe 5 to 10 million years? The film quotes Richard Dawkins unarguable statement that, “Without gradualness in these cases, we are back to a miracle, which is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation.”

Allen, David Berlinski, and Jonathan Wells all spoke afterwards on a discussion panel. The inimitable Berlinski, the William F. Buckley of Darwin doubters, was in fine form, at one point amusingly decapitating a rambling student challenge from the audience with the concise answer, “No.” I also loved his insight that the ugliness of the results of the Darwinian idea, its effects on our culture, are far from irrelevant in judging the idea’s truth. This is another one of Darwin’s dilemmas. Berlinski cited Keats, “‘Truth is truth, beauty truth,’ — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” No, he pointed out, you can’t separate the consequences of Darwinian theory from its truth. Beauty may well be an aspect of truth.

Heady stuff, but Berlinski brought it down to earth the next morning in the studio of Dennis Miller in Culver City here, discussing the new paperback edition of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretentions. The last segment included David’s very funny riff on how a cow-like creature could take to the seas as a proto-whale, per the Darwinian just-so story, including the challenge of developing nipples that work underwater. Miller took up the nipple image and developed it in a manner that I’m not sure belongs on a blog intended for all the family, but was very entertaining nevertheless.

What do Discover magazine, The London Gazette, The Wichita Eagle, Commentary, Forbes, The Weekly Standard and UC Berkeley’s student paper, The Daily Californian, all have in common? They are just some of the publications that have published an essay or opinion piece by David Berlinski in the past 15 years. And those pieces are among 32 of Berlinski’s finest finally collected together in one volume: The Deniable Darwin. Berlinski, there is little argument, is a skeptic’s skeptic — the last of a dying breed. Lately it seems that everywhere one looks there is someone with the answer to everything. There are precious few true skeptics left, and Berlinski is certainly in the top rank in regards to the sciences. When Read More ›

David Berlinski is currently stateside for his speaking tour of the U.S., and The Devil’s Delusion is selling briskly, already in its second printing in paperback. Now there’s a new discussion guide to complement Dr. Berlinski’s powerful book. Because Dr. Berlinski’s enjoyable style makes the book so eminently readable, not to mention its importance as a response to the new atheists, The Devil’s Delusion and its new discussion guide are a natural choice for book clubs, small groups, adult Sunday school classes, and anyone who wants to delve a little deeper. The guide reads as if a college professor highlighted the book’s most trenchant points and asked the class to chew on them, a style that proves fertile for book Read More ›

Seeking relief from the demands of geschaeft, The Washington Times reported recently, senior officials at the National Science Foundation routinely spend a great deal of their time (and our money) visiting pornographic sites on the Internet.

Just possibly, I suspect, they spend all of their time on stress relief and none on the public’s business, stress relief so striking as to cancel its cause entirely.

“The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive,” the Times reported, “they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.”

ENV: How do the scientific issues you write about affect the way we live? Why should the Darwin question matter to people who don’t normally concern themselves with scientific theories?

DB: I think of the Darwinian debate in the way that Dickens thought of Jardynce v Jarndyce in Bleak House. It is awfully easy to be sucked into it, and once suckered, awfully difficult to get out. I have seen it so often. A man wakes and because has read a book or scanned an essay, he is persuaded that he can make a contribution. He is eager to make it. He offers his opinion on the Internet and is gratified by the prospect of the congratulations that he is shortly to receive. No one pays the slightest attention. He then discovers that to be heard, it is necessary that he amplifies his level of abuse. He does that, referring to the Discovery Institute as the Dishonesty Institute. Repeating the phrase as he moves his bowels affords him an unexpected pleasure. As his influence remains insignificant, his indignation mounts. In the morning, he scuttles to his computer to check his own postings; satisfied when he finds them, and beside himself when he fails. His appetite for conflict sharpens. He becomes determined to exaggerate every issue; and to magnify trivialities. Sooner or later, his Internet presence seems real, and his real life unreal. He ends in the state achieved by almost every Internet blogger: He commences to gibber repetitively. Glen Davidson, who posts to David Klinghoffer’s blog, has recently entered the gibbering state.

It is all very sad. I have warned about the phenomenon many times.

ENV: You describe yourself as a “secular Jew” and “remarkably indifferent to the religious life.” Yet so much of your writing bears directly on whether religion has been intellectually defeated by secular, science-flavored ideologies. You can’t have given no thought to religious questions. Would you share with us your hunches and suspicions about spiritual reality, the trend in your thinking, if not your firm beliefs?

DB: No. Either I cannot or I will not. I do not know whether I am unable or unwilling. The question elicits in me a stubborn refusal. Please understand. It is not an issue of privacy. I have, after all, blabbed my life away: Why should I call a halt here? I suppose that I am by nature a counter-puncher. What I am able to discern of the religious experience often comes about reactively. V.S. Naipaul remarked recently that he found the religious life unthinkable.
He does, I was prompted to wonder? Why does he?

His attitude gives rise to mine. That is the way in which I wrote The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.

Is there anything authentic in my religious nature?
Beats me.

ENV: Darwinism is fiercely guarded by a scientific guild. What does the guild have at stake in this? Prestige? Money? To some observers, the defense seems impermeable. Do you see cracks in the fortress wall opening up?

DB: Fiercely guarded, but not, mind you, effectively guarded. If the Darwinian Guild, to adapt your phrase (since science has nothing to do with it), was interested in rational self promotion, the Guild would have never allowed its members to display in public their characteristic attitude of invincible arrogance and sheep-like stupidity. Just listen to them as they limber up in the insult room: Dumbski, Little Mikey Behe, Stevie Meyer (a regression to school yard taunts irresistible at both the Panda’s Thumb and Talk Reason), the creationist playbook, creationist pablum, creationism in a cheap tuxedo, tired creationist canards, creationist cranks, ID’iots, creotards, creos, sky fairies, liars for Jesus. I’ve even seen Disco’Tute, this the invention of an elderly fellow at the Panda’s Thumb who, like Polonius, imagines that he is the soul of wit. One lunatic named Quick or Quack — or is that simply the sound of his posts? — has become fond of the phrase mendacious intellectual pornography and has so overused it that his fellow bloggers have taken to attacking him. When they do, Quick as a Quack responds that they are guilty of mendacious intellectual pornography. The gabble is as unedifying as it is unending.

What is wonderful, I think, is the way in which membership in the Guild so runs to type, P.Z. Myers, to take the loudest case, reveling in his role as the hearty American rustic, a man prepared as circumstances demand either to desecrate the Catholic wafer or at dinner to immerse his feet in a platter of boeuf bourguignon. If in public he now refrains from withdrawing long spools of lint from his navel and examining them studiously that is because Richard Dawkins has advised him that at Oxford, it is no longer done.