George Gilder

mites

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Review of The Devil's Delusion by David Berlinski

The pseudo-religion of atheistic scientism that Berlinski exposes in the Devil's Delusion reflects the tendency of scientists to become what Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called "barbarians of specialization." Knowing much about one thing gives them confidence to pontificate grandly about other subjects on which their expertise is irrelevant, or to inflate their own little patches of expertise into "grand unified theories." Knowing more and more about less and less, they finally rise into the nation's TV airhead empyrean chattering vacuously about anything and everything like George Clooney or Al Gore, Carl Sagan or James Watson, Richard Dreyfuss or Steven Weinberg-- actors, politicians, scientists...in the giddy glow of the tube who can tell them apart in their common babble of moral relativism and anti-capitalist eschatology?

The supreme pontiff of the new religion is Richard Dawkins, an Oxford biologist who rode high on the best-seller lists for months with a book entitled The God Delusion. Venerated by the media for his alleged scientific genius, he can say almost anything and no one seems to laugh or scoff. For example, The New York Times Book Review late last year published Dawkins' shockingly inept essay on Michael Behe's new book on the limits of Darwinism, despite Dawkins' undisguised personal bile and his amazing idea that the case for the Darwinian origin of new species is aided by invoking a "baying chorus" of the many diverse breeds of dogs.

Now Dawkins has met his nemesis in Berlinski, a Princeton PhD, secular Jew, and a former fellow at the Institute des Hautes Scientifique in France. Now with the Discovery Institute, Berlinski commands a range of scientific disciplines and philosophical skills that project him well beyond the camp of Ortega's barbarians. The polymathic author of several formidable books on mathematics and logic, he in recent years has written a series of incandescent essays on biology, physics, psychology, and mathematics in Commentary magazine that have subsequently evoked an overflow of dumbfounded responses in its letters pages (Berlinski's replies are feloniously sharp). The Devil's Delusion makes the compelling argument that the anti-God fetish of modern science has driven many scientists into a mad nihilism that has crippled their scientific work as well.

Detailing the horrendous record of massacres and holocausts committed by aggressive atheists during the 20th century, Berlinski observes "what anyone capable of reading the German sources already knew: A sinister current of influence ran from Darwin's theory of evolution to Hitler's policy of extermination." An implicit syllogism underlies all these horrors--A: "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted." B: "If science is true, then God does not exist." C: If science is true, then everything is permitted." As Berlinski shows, these propositions led predictably (Dostoyevski and Nietsche predicted them after all) to the holocaust.

After demonstrating the moral obtuseness of atheist science, The Devil's Delusion goes on to castigate its crippling limitations even as a means of explaining physical reality. Ignoring the hierarchical structure of the universe, with the concept preceding the concrete, the algorithm preceding the computer, the DNA word preceding the flesh, and theory preceding experiment, science has blinded itself to the indispensable role of faith in all forms of knowledge. In Berlinski's view, there is a crucial point of convergence between moral laws and physical laws: "In both cases we do not know why the laws are true but we can sense that the question hides a profound mystery." Science, as Berlinski avers, is "everywhere saturated with faith."

A complacent sciolist atheism, though, distracts science from the reality of its own necessary religious and hierarchical assumptions. Science does not harbor the slightest idea of "how the ordered physical, moral, mental, aesthetic, social world in which [we] live could have ever arisen from the seething anarchy of the world of particle physics." The so-called "standard model" seems to supply "as many elementary particles as there is funding to find them" while offering scant support for the reductionist assumption that the world is best understood by atomization into its smallest possible parts.

Beyond reductionism, science offers at least six mostly incompatible theories of reality: Quantum theory focused on subatomic elements, Relativity Theory spanning the universe, String theory seeking a grand unification in multidimensional infinitesimals, Thermodynamics with its arrow of time and slope of entropic decline, Evolution in its grand bottom-up materialist ascent, molecular biology with its top- down DNA codes, and the macro-quantum concept of Entanglement which links quantum entities across the cosmos beyond conventional time and space. Each theory offers stunning insights into some limited domain but fails to fit with the neighboring regimes.

Eroding the coherence of the entire set is the self-defeating character of the underlying materialism: a theory that denies the significance of theories and theorists and ignores the non-material abstractions on which it relies. All the incompatible physical systems of modern science ultimately repose on a foundation of mathematical logic. Finally making a hash of all atheist materialism, therefore, is the paramount mathematical finding of the 20th century: the inexorable Godelian incompleteness of mathematics. As Kurt Godel, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, and Gregory Chaitin have proven, mathematical logic, whether expressed in computer algorithms or differential equations, finally relies on premises beyond itself. In other words, faith is critical to mathematics and computer logic, which are themselves abstract conceptual schemes not in any way reducible to materialist dogma.

Apparently to distract attention from this baffling paradox of atheism, scientists have clutched at a set of laughable chimeras. Dawkins, for example, accepts the idea of a "megaverse," a stupendous "Landscape" of infinitely parallel universes that explain away the absurd improbabilities of Darwinian materialism by the assumption that our own universe is only one of an infinite array. As Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg sums up the argument in a transparent tautology preening as science, "Any scientist must live in a part of the megaverse where physical parameters take values suitable for the appearance of life and its evolution into scientists." Other physical parameters are presumed to hold in other universes that don't harbor life.

This stupendous circularity is called the Anthropic Principle and is touted as an explanation of the universe superior to the idea of God. As Dawkins puts it, "Better many worlds than one god." Berlinski concludes, Dawkins' favored "Landscape and the Anthropic principle represent the moral relativism of physical thought." Since moral relativism is the goal of nearly all academic ethical and political philosophizing, this outcome is entirely predictable despite its devastating impact on the truth claims of science.

Berlinski concludes that "the willingness of physical scientists to explore such strategies in thought might suggest to a perceptive psychoanalyst a desire not so much to discover a new idea as to avoid an old one." But the idea of a God in a hierarchichal universe is essential to coherent thought or uplifting culture of any kind.

A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial, from the fetishes of pornstars to Hollywood's Hitman of the Month. Without a sense of the transcendent, science ends up pursuing reductionist trivia, from the next particle or dimension of string to ever more abstruse arguments for the animality of man and the pointlessness of the Universe.

The scientific community remains oblivious to its own philosophical inanity chiefly because of its insularity and defensiveness, protected by a trumpery of "peer review" and immunity to outside criticism. The public has tended to go along with the scam because of modern science's alleged relation to engineering and technology. Dawkins and his ally Daniel Dennett both declare, in the spirit of the common claim of "no atheists in foxholes," that there are no devout believers on airplanes. Anyone undertaking a journey by air, they say, is staking his life on the validity and reliability of modern science. Few travelers indeed would find solace if glancing into the cockpit as they boarded their plane they saw the pilot praying, rather than scrutinizing his instruments.

Based on top-down engineering and intelligent design, however, the sciences that enable modern flight have nothing in common with the pastiche of atheist materialism and moral relativism that Dawkins and Dennett uphold. Navier-Stokes flow equations, advanced materials science, solid state physics, molecular chemistry, and computer design, among a host of real scientific disciplines, are expressions not of bottom-up random processes but of hierarchical planning in which the ideas and schematics precede their physical embodiment. Through most of the history of science, from Michael Faraday to Enrico Fermi, its protagonists were masters of the technology of their day. They built the apparatus that tested their concepts and embodied their theories. Science and engineering were cognate disciplines.

Beginning with Einstein, however, scientists reached for a new role as free-floating philosophical gurus and theological prophets. Only Einstein himself and Richard Feynman were capable of fulfilling this mission at all. Seeking ...