Devil’s Delusion

Of all the people I’ve seen on film recently, the one I’d most want to be is David Berlinski, whom Ben Stein interviewed extensively in his Paris apartment that reeked with sophistication and culture. Berklinski, by his own definition a “secular Jew” with no memory of Hebrew, has just published The Devil’s Delusion , a response to the militant atheists.

I like his Paris home; I also like the way he writes: “A little philosophy, as Francis Bacon observed, ‘inclineth man’s mind to atheism.’ A very little philosophy is often all that is needed. In a recent BBC program entitled A Brief History of Unbelief , the host, Jonathan Miller, and his guest, the philosopher Colin McGinn, engaged in a veritable orgy of competitive skepticism, so much so that in the end, the viewer was left wondering whether either man believed sincerely in the existence of the other. Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is in this tradition, and if he book is devoid of any intellectual substance whatsoever, it is, at least, brisk, engaging, and short. To anyone having read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon , these will appear as very considerable virtues.”

One of Berlinski’s central arguments is that the militant atheists assume that “there is something answering to the name of science,” which, he claims is simply false. There are great scientific theories, but they are “isolated miracles, great mountain peaks surrounded by a range of low, furry foothills.” He quotes Roger Penrose to the effect that these theories are “magnificent, profound, difficult, sometimes phenomenally accurate,” but also quotes Penrose’s admission that these theories constitute a “tantalizingly inconsistent scheme of things.”