[The Devil's Delusion]

- CHAPTER ONE -

“Atheism is the schwerpunkt, as German military theorists used to say with satisfaction, the place where force is concentrated and applied; and what lies behind is a doctrinal system, a way of looking at the world, and so an ideology. It is an ideology with no truly distinct center and the fuzziest of boundaries. For purposes of propaganda it hardly matters. Science as an institution is unified by the lowest common denominator of belief, and that is the conviction that science is a very good thing.”

Berlinski quotes Victor Stenger: “Astronomical observations continue to demonstrate that the earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on a vast beach.” He observes, “What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise.”

“If nothing else, the attack on traditional religious thought marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion. From cosmology to biology, its narratives have become the narratives. They are, these narratives, immensely seductive, so much so that looking at them with innocent eyes requires a very deliberate act. And like any militant church, this one places a familiar demand before others: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

- CHAPTER TWO -

“It is religion, Christopher Hitchens claims, that is dangerous, because it is ‘the cause of dangerous sexual repression.’ Short of gender insensitivity, what could be more dangerous than dangerous sexual repression?” (18) One of the claims of the New Atheists is that religion fosters evil, and that most of the world’s evil is due to religion and its affects. Eliminate religion and you eliminate much of the evil in the world. Not only is this a wildly arrogant assumption regarding the complicated web of cause-and-effect (as well as betraying knowledge we have of the human condition), but it can only be enforced by blinding oneself to reality. “The conviction that in Western Europe and the United States nothing worse has happened is one reason that so many scientific atheists affirm that they are of the Enlightenment party… Children of the Enlightenment do not, of course, dwell overly on the dreadful acts undertaken in its name when the Enlightenment first became a living force in France: all perished, all— / Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks, / Head after head, and never heads enough / For those that bade them fall.”

“For scientists persuaded that there is no God, there is no finer pleasure than recounting the history of religious brutality and persecution. Sam Harris in this regard is especially enthusiastic, The End of Faith recounting in lurid but lingering detail the methods of torture used in the Spanish Inquisition… [A] great deal of human suffering has been caused by religious fanaticism. If the Inquisition no longer has the power to compel our indignation, the Moslem world often seems quite prepared to carry the burden of exuberant depravity in its place. Nonetheless, there is this awkward fact: The Twentieth century was not an age of faith, and it was awful. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot will never be counted among the religious leaders of mankind.”

“In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov exclaims that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. Throughout the nineteenth century, as religious conviction seeped out of the institutions of western culture, poets and philosophers had the uneasy feeling that its withdrawal might signal the ascension of great evil in the world… What gives Karamazov’s warning—for that is what it is—its power is just that it has become part of a most up-to-date hypothetical syllogism: The first premise: If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. And the second: If science is true, then God does not exist. The conclusion: If science is true, then everything is permitted.”

“Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, [Dawkins] affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.” (26) It’s interesting that Dawkins spend so much time bashing bad religious people, but when he gets to bad atheists, he says that the root problem wasn’t atheism but simply wanting to kill people. Thus we find that when a person’s religious and bad, religion is to blame; but when a person is unreligious and bad, the person—and not the lack of their religion—is to blame. It’s telling: he’s doing to religious sensitivities what theists often to do atheist sensibilities. Theists proclaim that bad religious people are just bad people, but that bad atheists are bad because they’re atheists and simply need to become theists. We’re all guilty of this logical fallacy.

“What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.”

“Harris is concerned to affirm that [the Jews] are misguided as well: ‘It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half of your people delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.” BUT, Berlinski states on pages 30-31, “The Jewish people yet live, and even in Eastern Europe—even in Poland—they have returned to their ancestral homes; but the thousand-year Reich, that lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens, or ground under Russian tank treads, or destroyed by American artillery, or left to wander in its exiled millions across all the violated borders of Central Europe, and if God did not protect his chosen people as precisely as Harris might have wished, He did, in an access of his old accustomed vigor, smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.”

On page 35 Berlinski quotes the philosopher Simon Blackburn: “The problem is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, nonethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part.” He goes on to say, “Blackburn is, of course, convinced that the chief task at hand in facing this question—his chief task, in any case—‘is above all to refuse appeal to a supernatural order.’ It is a strategy that merits admiration for the severity of mind it expresses. It is rather as if an accomplished horseman were to decide that his chief task were to learn to ride without a horse. If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.”

“If moral imperatives are not commanded by God’s will, and if they are not in some sense absolute, then what ought to be is a matter simply of what men and women decide should be. There is no other source of judgment. What is this if not another way of saying that if God does not exist, everything is permitted? These conclusions suggest quite justifiably that in failing to discover the source of value in the world at large, we must in the end retreat to a form of moral relativism, the philosophy of the fraternity house or the faculty dining room—similar environments, after all—whence the familiar declaration that just as there are no absolute truths, there are no moral absolutes.”

- CHAPTER THREE -

Methodological naturalism claims that everything in the universe can be explained within the constraints and parameters of the physical universe. This claim rests upon the assumption of Materialism, the idea (below) that all that exists is matter. This assumption cannot be proven or disproven by scientific means, and thus a validation by scientific means cannot be made. Ultimately the assumptions of materialism and naturalism are just that: assumptions of the most philosophical nature. 

 “There is nothing in nature, ancient Greek atomists said, but atoms and the void, and while this claim has over the centuries been refined, it remains deep down the same. The end of the matter is matter… The advantage of materialism as a doctrine is that it sanctions an easy argument for atheism. Either the Deity is a material object or he is not. If he is, then he is just one of those things, and if he is not, then materialism could not be true… For the atheist persuaded that materialism offers him a no-nonsense doctrinal affiliation, materialism in this sense comes to the declaration of a barroom drinker that he will have whatever he’s having, no matter who he is or what he is having. What he is having is what he always takes, and that is any concept, mathematical structure, or vagrant idea needed to get on with it.”

The unprovable assumption that the material world is all that exists is integral to arguments against God. If God is not material, then he doesn’t exist. If he is material, then we should be able to detect him by the physical sciences. If we cannot, then he doesn’t exist. This is the heart of the scientific argument against God. What we have, then, is nothing less than the cosmonaut proclaiming that he has not seen God in outer space, except now we are claiming it with much more boldness and with bigger telescopes.

“Is there a God who has among other things created the universe? ‘It is not by its conclusion,’ C.F. von Weizsacker has written in The Relevance of Science, ‘but by its methodological starting point that modern sciences excludes direct creation. Our methodology would not be honest if this fact were denied… such is the faith in the science of our time, and which we all share’ (italics added).”

- CHAPTER FOUR -

“The cosmological argument emerges from a simple question and its answer. The question: What caused the universe? The answer: Something.” Some philosophers, Berlinski points out, have gone so far as to argue—in their attempt to wiggle out of the cosmological paradox, much to the approval of militant atheists and the scorn of the vast majority of other philosophers—that the cosmological argument is founded on the assumption that effects are preceded by causes; the argument goes that this assumption is unfounded, but if it is an assumption it is one that is warranted, for we see in nature nothing exempt from this causal nature. “Seeing an endless row of dominoes toppling before our eyes, would we without pause say that no first domino set the other dominoes to toppling? Really?”

“The universe, orthodox cosmologists believe, came into existence as the expression of an explosion—what is now called the Big Bang… The Big Bang was not an event taking place at a time or in a place. Space and time were themselves created by the Big Bang, the measure along with the measured… [The] Big Bang is now a part of the established structure of modern physics. From time to time, it is true, the astrophysical journals report the failure of observation to confirm the grand design. It hardly matters. The physicists have not only persuaded themselves of the merits of the Big Bang cosmology, they have persuaded everyone else as well. The Big Bang has come to signify virtually a universal creed, men and women who know nothing of cosmology convinced that the rumble of creation lies within reach of their collective memory.”

“For more than a century, physicists had taken a manful pride in the fact that theirs was a discipline that celebrated the weird, the bizarre, the unexpected, the mind-bending, and the recondite. Here was a connection that any intellectual primitive could at once grasp: The universe had a beginning, thus something must have caused it to begin. Where would physics be, physicists asked themselves, if we had paid the slightest attention to the obvious?”

“[The Big Bang] suggests an old idea in thought: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This unwelcome juxtaposition of physical and biblical ideas persuaded the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, an ardent atheist, to dismiss the Big Bang after he had named it. In this he was not alone. Many physicists have found the idea that the universe had a beginning alarming. ‘So long as the universe had a beginning,’ Stephen Hawking has written, ‘we could suppose it had a creator.’… [There] is a very natural connection between the fact that the universe had a beginning and the hypothesis that it had a creator. It is a connection so plain that, glowing with its own energy, it may be seen in the dark. Although questions may be raised about what it means, the connection itself cannot be ignored.”

“All might have been well, or at least better than it turned out to be, had the Big Bang been another one of those tedious ideas that flicker luridly for a moment and then wink out. There are so many of them. But quite the contrary proved to be the case. Over the course of more than half a century—a very long time in the history of the physical sciences—inferences gathered strength separately, and when combined they gathered strength in virtue of their combination. One line of inference was observational; the second, theoretical; the two together, irresistible.”

Faced with the inescapable nature of the singularity, atheists have sought in myriad ways to dodge this problem, even to the point of claiming that what lie at the beginning of the universe isn’t some divine being but aliens. Berlinski quotes astrophysicist Christopher Isham on page 81: “Perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.”

“In many ways, this was the worst of all possible worlds. Religious believers had emerged from their seminars well satisfied with what they could understand; the physicists themselves could understand nothing very well.” Berlinski continues, “Those who believe in God and those who do not may resolve their differences by agreeing to say nothing. There is nonetheless a striking point at which Big Bang cosmology and traditional theological claims intersect. The universe has not proceeded from the everlasting to the everlasting. The cosmological beginning may be obscure, but the universe is finite in time.”

“If nothing else, the facts of Big Bang cosmology indicate that one objection to the argument that Thomas Aquinas offered is empirically unfounded: Causes in nature do come to an end. If science has shown that God does not exist, it has not been by appealing to Big Bang cosmology. The hypothesis of God’s existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent.”

- CHAPTER FIVE -

“If it is possible that something might not exist, Aquinas asserts, then it is certain that at some time it did not exist. In this, Aquinas was reprising a view of possibility that may be traced back to the Greek philosopher Diodorus. But if the universe did not exist at some point of time, then it emerged from absolutely nothing. The universe is everything that there is. What beyond nothing is left to explain its promotion from inexistence to existence? This, Aquinas observes, is incoherent. Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing, nothing, as ancient writers said. Because it is impossible to understand the emergence of something from nothing, Aquinas concludes, something must have acted to bring the universe into existence.”

“The Sea of Indeterminate Potentiality, and all cognate concepts, belong to a group of physical arguments with two aims. The first is to find a way around the initial singularity of standard Big Bang cosmology. Physicists accept this aim devoutly because the Big Bang singularity strikes an uncomfortably theistic note… The second aim is to account for the emergence of the universe in some way that will allow physicists to say with quiet pride that they have gotten the thing to appear from nothing, and especially nothing resembling a deity or a singularity.” The foundation of the entire theory is the attempt to wiggle out of the Big Bang’s theistic inferences.

“Arguments follow from assumptions, and assumptions follow from beliefs, and very rarely—perhaps never—do beliefs reflect an agenda determined entirely by facts. No less than the doctrines of religious belief, the doctrines of quantum cosmology are what they seem: biased, partial, inconclusive, and largely in the service of passionate but unexamined conviction.” Berlinski finishes off the chapter with this indicting remark: “Quantum cosmology is a branch of mathematical metaphysics. It provides no cause for the emergence of the universe, and so does not answer the first cosmological question, and it offers no reason for the existence of the universe, and so does not address the second.”

- CHAPTER SIX -

Berlinski quotes physicist Paul Davies: “Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth—the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient ‘coincidences’ and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal.”

Atheist Fred Hoyle admitted begrudgingly, “The universe looks like a put-up job.” Berlinski writes, “An atheist, Hoyle did not care to consider who might have put the job up, and when pressed, he took refuge in the hypothesis that aliens were at fault. In this master stroke he was joined later by Francis Crick. When aliens are dropped from the argument, there remains a very intriguing question: Why do the constants and parameters of theoretical physics obey [their] tight constraints?”

“The laws of nature are what they are. They are fundamental. But why are they true? Why do material objects attract one another throughout the universe with a kind of brute and aching inevitability? Why is space-and-time curved by the presence of matter? Why is the electron charged?... Why are things as they are when what they are seems anything but arbitrary? One answer is obvious. It is the one that theologians have always offered: The universe looks like a put-up job because it is a put-up job. That this answer is obvious is no reason to think it false. Nonetheless, the answer that common sense might suggest is deficient in one respect: It is emotionally unacceptable because a universe that looks like a put-up job puts off a great many physicists.”

Faced with the apparent fine-tuning of the universe from the cosmological perspective, physicists and mathematicians have been beating their heads against brick walls trying to figure out why it looks that way when it’s obviously not been fine-tuned, since we know that there is no one to fine-tune it. It’s like someone clutching an apple, confident it’s not an apple, and turning it over and over trying to prove it’s not an apple. The assumption is that there is nothing beyond the material, nothing beyond the natural world, at work in the apparent fine-tuning of our universe, and thus though it certainly looks to be fine-tuned, it simply cannot be if the assumption about the natural state of the universe is true.

“[Physicists] work to cancel the suggestion that the universe—our own, the one we inhabit—is any kind of a put-up job. This is their emotional content, the place where they serve prejudice. These ideas have an important role to play in the economy of the sciences, and for this reason, they have been welcomed by the community of scientific atheists with something akin to a cool murmur of relief.”

- CHAPTER SEVEN -

“Dawkins asserts that God is an irrelevance because He has been assigned the task of constructing a universe that is improbable. If the universe is improbable, ‘it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.’ Why an improbable universe demands an improbable God, Dawkins does not say and I do not know.” (142) Thus one of Dawkins’ main lines of attack against the Boeing 747 argument so beloved by creationists and ID theorists is to say that although the beginning of life was improbable, putting God behind it doesn’t eradicate the problem: at the least it becomes an argument of regression, and at most it exponentially multiples the improbabilities: now you just don’t have one hurdle to leap against the odds, you’ve got two!

“The spontaneous emergence of life on earth, [atheist Fred Hoyle] observed, is about as likely as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 out of the debris. Although an atheist, Hoyle was skeptical about Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Dawkins passionate in its defense. Since the junkyard expresses with rare economy precisely the odds favoring the spontaneous appearance of life—they are remarkably prohibitive on virtually every calculation—it has been an irritation to Dawkins ever since it made its appearance.”

“On the one hand, there is the claim that the universe is improbable; on the other, the claim that God made the universe. Considered jointly, these claims form an unnatural union. Probabilities belong to the world in which things happen because they might, creation to the world in which things happen because they must. We explain creation by appealing to creators, whether deities or the inflexible laws of nature. We explain what is chancy by appealing to chance. We cannot do both. If God did make the world, it is not improbable. If it is improbable, then God did not make it. The best we could say is that God made a world that would be improbable had it been produced by chance. But it wasn’t; and so He didn’t.”

“Any conception of a contingent deity, Aquinas argues, is doomed to fail, and it is doomed to fail precisely because whatever He might do to explain the existence of the universe, His existence would again require an explanation. ‘Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary.’ The conclusion that a religious believer will take from Dawkins’s argument is either that God is improbable or that He is necessary.”

- CHAPTER EIGHT -

“The idea that human beings have been endowed with powers and properties not found elsewhere in the animal kingdom—or the universe, so far as we can tell—arises from a simple imperative: Just look around.” He goes on, “The apes are, after all, behind the bars of their cages and we are not. Eager for the experiments to begin, they are impatient for their food to be served. They seem impatient for little else. After years of punishing trials, a few of them have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say… Experiments conducted by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth—and they are exquisite—indicate that like other mammals, baboons have a rich inner world, something that only the intellectual shambles of behavioral psychology could ever have placed in doubt. Simian social structures are often intricate. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas reason; they form plans; they have preferences; they are cunning; they have passions and desires; and they suffer. The same is true of cats, I might add. In much of this, we see ourselves. But beyond what we have in common with the apes, we have nothing in common, and while the similarities are interesting, the differences are profound.”

“If we are able to explain how the human mind works neither in terms of a series of physical causes nor in terms of a series of infinitely receding mechanical devices, what then is left? There is the ordinary, very rich, infinitely moving account of mental life that without hesitation we apply to ourselves. It is an account frankly magical in its nature. The human mind registers, reacts, and responds; it forms intentions, conceives problems, and then, as Aristotle dryly noted, it acts. And in none of this do we seem to be doing anything that can be explained or expressed in terms of what the brain does, or what any machine can do. ‘Mind is like no other property of physical systems,’ the physicist Erich Harth has reasonably remarked. ‘It is not just that we don’t know the mechanisms that give rise to it. We have difficulty in seeing how any mechanism can give rise to it.’”

“We do not have a serious scientific theory explaining the powers and properties of the human mind. The claim that the human mind is the product of evolution is not unassailable fact. It is barely coherent. The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race.”

- CHAPTER NINE -

“Within the English-speaking world, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. No matter the effort made by biologists, the thing continues to elicit the same reaction it has always elicited: You’ve got to be kidding, right? There is wide appreciation of the fact that if biologists are wrong about Darwin, they are wrong about life, and if they are wrong about life, they are wrong about everything.”

“Suspicions about Darwin’s theory arise for two reasons. The first: the theory makes little sense. The second: it is supported by very little evidence.”

“There are no laboratory demonstrations of speciation… millions of fruit flies coming and going while never once suggesting that they were destined to appear as anything other than fruit flies. This is the conclusion suggested as well by more than six thousand years of artificial selection, the practice of barnyard and backyard alike… If species have an essential nature that beyond limits cannot change, then random variations and natural selection cannot change them. We must look elsewhere for an account that does just to their nature or to the facts.”

“Although Darwin’s theory is very often compared favorably to the great theories of mathematical physics on the grounds that evolution is as well established as gravity, very few physicists have been heard observing that gravity is as well established as evolution. They know better and are not stupid… In the privacy of the Susan B. Anthony faculty lounge, [scientific colleagues] often tell one another with relief that it is a very good thing the public has no idea what the research literature really suggests.”

“In the summer of 2007, Euguene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, published a paper entitled ‘The Biological Big Bang Model for the Major Transitions in Evolution.’… [He wrote] ‘Major transitions in biological evolution… show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity’ (italics added)… If those ‘major transitions’ represent a ‘sudden emergence of new forms,’ the obvious conclusion to draw is not that nature is perverse but that Darwin was wrong. ‘The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities,’ Koonin goes on to say, ‘are harder to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern than, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The facts that fall outside the margins of Darwin’s theory include ‘the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains: eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla.’ That is, pretty much everything.” Koonin goes on to say, ‘In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history, the principal ‘types’ seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate ‘grades’ or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.’”

“A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington DC concluded that the so-called Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of new life forms about 530 million years ago, could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design—hardly a proposition unknown in Western thought. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists.”