David Berlinski

ENV: Did anyone in particular, a colleague or friend, influence the conclusions you reach in these essays? DB: No, I don’t think so. Daniel Gallin has been an influence on my thinking, but our friendship ended more almost thirty years ago, and so his influence is no longer of this time or place. Daniel introduced me to model theory. That was his gift to me. After studying with Church at Princeton, I regarded model theory as an immersion into cool water. Such ease, such elegance, such freedom! Had I stayed in mathematics as a research mathematician, I would have stayed in model theory. In the 1980s, I wrote a monograph for the Princeton University Press in which I reached the Read More ›

ENV: When did you start thinking, as a critic, about Darwinian evolution? Did anything in your biography incline you to freethinking in that area?

It was the fall of 1965. My graduate school roommate Daniel Messenger and I were ambling along Nassau Street in Princeton. We were munching the kind of wonderful Winesap apples that seem to have disappeared as a variety. I wonder why that is? Daniel’s girlfriend, Sandra Petersen, was there too. Daniel was a fine philosopher and Sandra was doing a degree in classical philosophy. We walked over to Darwin’s theory of evolution, living at the time in one of Princeton’s back alleys.

A back alley was the right place to look for Darwin. No one in the philosophy department at Princeton had ever introduced his name into a seminar, or thought to argue that his theory was relevant to our concerns.

ENV: Were you always subversive? Tell us about the childhood David Berlinski.

I am not sure that I would care to think of myself as subversive. It is a mole-and-badger kind of word, isn’t it? So long as we are searching for similes, I would prefer lion-like. Regal is another fine word.

I was from an early age indisposed to accept what I had been told. Having been urged not to insert a fork into an electrical outlet, I stuck one in anyway; I was shocked to discover that it was a poor idea, just as my mother had maintained. An impatient child, I became a school yard terror, and a high-school bully. At the Bronx High School of Science I was a part of the clique — Moose Moscowitz, Steven Parker, Arthur Klein, June Tauber, Alan Abramson — that inflicted a life-long feeling of inadequacy on everyone else. I am often astonished that we got out of high school alive.

For those who need a dose of urbane wit and keen insight, never fear; David Berlinski is back. With his excellent book is finally in paperback (after it sold out last year, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions was selling for more than three times its retail value on eBay), ENV interviewed Dr. Berlinski for a fascinating series of Q&A which we’re kicking off tomorrow, as well as an upcoming series of podcasts over at ID the Future. For more on Dr. Berlinski, including audio and video clips, articles, and continuing updates on his upcoming U.S. tour, head over to DavidBerlinski.org.

The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson recently wrote: The latest findings of the Pew Forum’s massive and indispensable U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reveal some intriguing confusion among Americans on cosmic issues. About 13 percent of evangelicals, it turns out, don’t believe in a personal God, leading to a shameful waste of golf time on Sunday mornings. And 9 percent of atheists report that they are skeptical of evolution. Are there atheist creationists? Well, there probably aren’t any atheist creationists, although, if Richard Dawkins can be an “Atheist for Jesus,” anything is possible. Yes, these folks may be severely confused (“deluded,” if you prefer). However, perhaps many of these atheists, while not being creationists, are simply skeptical of the Darwinian mechanism. (Gerson Read More ›

It’s surprising that editorial writers aren’t better educated on the issues they pontificate on.
Last weekend it was the New York Times making the claim that there are no weaknesses in modern evolutionary theory, albeit they were likely led astray by the misleading article by Laura Beil.
(As an aside, Ms. Beil finally did respond to my question about why she didn’t bother to contact Discovery Institute or Texans for Better Science Education, both of which she attacked in her story. Her response:

I did not contact you before the story because I was focusing on the situation here in Texas, and I am not aware that you have any direct involvement. I did not contact Texans for Better Science Education (other than to note their efforts) because the best source to represent their views is Don McLeroy.

You would think that in Journalism 101 reporters would learn that the best source to represent one’s views is one’s self, not someone else. But it is the New York Times, after all.)
Today it’s the Waco Tribune with this statement.

Evolution is fact, not theory.

Of course, it depends on what you mean by evolution.

Can’t get enough David Berlinski? If you’ve been going through withdrawl since Dr. Berlinski returned to Paris after his American book tour for The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, then have we got an interview for you: Read Christopher A. Ferrara’s interview “Jewish Intellectuals Challenge Tyranny of Darwinism.”

David Berlinski is back at NRO with a take down of the odious and tiresome John Derbyshire. Derbyshire has sunk to new lows recently in his attacks on Discovery Institute, Expelled, and anyone who has the temerity to advocate intelligent design or simply question Darwinism. Berlinski is in no mood to pull his punches in going after Derbyshire. Having not seen the documentary that he proposes to criticize, Derbyshire is nonetheless quite certain that he knows what it conveys. “It is pretty plain,” he asserts, “that it is a piece of creationist porn.” Perhaps I will be forgiven for suggesting that John Derbyshire’s late-night scrutiny of the Internet may have corrupted his habitual search for le mot juste. Expelled has Read More ›

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 ›

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 ›