Review of The Devil's Delusion

7/31/2019 Review of The Devil's Delusion

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The Devils Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions

by David Berlinski, reviewed by Pieter Uys.

In examining the limitations of science, The Devils Delusion

exposes the intellectual pretensions that have accumulated around

it. The word science has been exhausted by its examples, claims

Berlinski, just like democracy and justice.

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Militant atheists are True Believers in the ability of science to ultimately

answer every question of life, death, purpose and meaning. This lively and

witty dissection of their mindset and the flaws and fallacies of their reasoning

is a gem.

Science is often compared favourably to religion as the pursuit of knowledge

which offers truth as opposed to myth. But which absolute truth is offered by

science? The author identifies Newtonian mechanics, theories of the

electromagnetic field, special & general relativity and quantum mechanics.

These are admirable indeed but inconsistent. The disconnect between quantum

mechanics and quantum cosmology shows that the standard model is

inadequate, incomplete and arbitrary. It cannot explain the transition from

elementary particles to states of matter where complex structures form, nor

can it accommodate the force of gravity.

For the True Believer in science, the possibility of spirit cannot be

countenanced, so atheistic philosophers are driven to seek morality without

reference to a supernatural order. Let there be nothing! they demand as

they would rather abandon morality altogether than allow the possibility ofpure consciousness as the sourcce. As Berlinski points out with sparkling wit,

the disputations of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens include the affirmation of

trivialities, unsupported arguments, circular reasoning, contradiction,

speculation built upon speculation presented as fact, brittle logic,

mystification and detours into the fever swamps of postmodernist discourse

that have laid waste to much of the humanities.

Despite the advance of extreme relativism in particularly the human sciences,

reality remains. If there are no absolute truths, there are no moral absolutes.

No one believes the first and no one is prepared to live with the second,

Berlinski observes as he weighs the words of philosophers like Richard Rorty

and scientists such as Carl Sagan, Roger Penrose, Clifford Johnson, Hawking

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and Schrdinger.

Seductive yet jealous, the narratives of science allow no other narratives

before them. Berlinski looks at the scientific method, the cosmological

argument and Thomas Aquinas which leads him to the Big Bang and the

inescapable Singularity. Neither of the aforementioned is popular with devoted

atheists as the first reminds them of the Old Narrative of creation whilst the

second implies the existence of spirit or consciousness as source of

matter/energy.

Embraced to diminish The Big Bang, string theory piled up more dimensions

than the number of elementary particles discovered so far. Then the

Landscape was conjured up to support string theory. The Landscape is all

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things to all theories. Accommodating more than a mere 26 dimensions, the

Landscape encompasses the existence of multiverses or a megaverse that

conveniently dissolves all improbabilities. The all, or the totality of multi /

megaverses, thus consists of a clamor of contradictory narratives. This

cacophonous discourse excludes the possibility of a meta-narrative as narrative

negates narrative like particles of matter and anti-matter.

The Anthropic Principle, served up in ever more flavors and tastes, represents

the rise of moral relativism in the realm of physical thought. The Landscape is

an article of faith since this genre of argument that makes an appeal to

unobservable entities is no different from theological or magical arguments.

Trading on improbability, they are unstable, offering explanations without end.

Nonsense in other words.

Berlinski scrutinizes evolution, evolutionary biology, the human mind and

evolutionary psychology. He notes that Freud knew the house was haunted but

could not identify the ghosts. Dismissal of the mind as a separate ontological

category is the great commandment of the new zealots. Steven Pinker insists

that the mind does not exist and that it is a computer. The possibility ofconsciousness / spirit existing independent of matter inspires Angst.

To their disappointment, nature is not revealing its ontological essentials

through the hoped-for division into a finite number of elementary particles.

Instead, the number of these keeps rising. And on the quantum level, an array

of particles, fields, forces, symmetries and energies interact with extravagant

complexity. As for evolution, the past remains enigmatic. Long eras in which

nothing happened and the lack of a record of transition between species are

not denied by paleontologists. Where are the intermediate forms? The

evidence comprises only rapid emergence of diverse forms at new levels of

complexity.

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Ultimately, science tells us nothing of love and death and yearning or the

scythe of time. We do not know how and why they entered into our existence.

The realm of the physical sciences is not our world because our world contains

too many things that cannot be explained in scientific terms. Therefore, we

have to look elsewhere for explanations, Berlinski concludes.

For further information and insight on respectively the closed mind and the

scientific process, I highly recommend The True Believerby Eric Hoffer and

Science, Faith and Societyby Michael Polanyi.

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Review of The Devil's Delusion