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.

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 of pure 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

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

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 of consciousness / 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.

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 Believer by Eric Hoffer and Science, Faith and Society by Michael Polanyi.