The idea that the practice of science is at odds with religious commitment has long been part of conventional wisdom. In the 18th century, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment argued that science is the voice of reason while religion is little more than blind faith. Only by embracing science as the one true source of genuine knowledge, they argued, can humankind be rid of superstition.
The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions
, by David Berlinksi, Crown Forum, 237 pages, $27.95
A glance at the longer sweep of history shows this Enlightenment view to be misguided. Doubt has been an integral part of religion at least since the Book of Job, while science has often gone with credulity. The doctrines of dialectical materialism and "scientific racism" promoted by communists and Nazis, respectively, during the 20th century were as irrational as anything in the history of religion. Yet in the 20th century, millions of people embraced these pernicious ideologies as scientific truth.
Despite being at variance with historical experience, the idea that science and religion are opposites is embedded in modern Western culture, and it has been given a new lease on life in the writings of the current wave of "scientific atheism." Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have popularized the Enlightenment view that a reductive type of materialism is the only picture of the world compatible with the results of scientific inquiry. Promoting Darwinism as an intellectual orthodoxy - a creed rather than a provisional hypothesis - these writers renew the old quarrel between science and religion. Though controversy has been intense, it can hardly be described as having made any large intellectual advance on the debate that raged in Victorian times.
There is actually very little that is new in the so-called new atheism, whose claim to be based on science is as dubious today as it has ever been. A critique of the contemporary assault on religion is therefore much needed, and in The Devil's Delusion, David Berlinski gives us a polemic that is powerful, erudite and often savagely funny. Berlinski - a mathematician and well-known critic of evolutionary theory, though not a proponent of "intelligent design" - has two targets in his sights: the conventional belief that religious thought is intrinsically superstitious and the materialist philosophy that Dawkins and his fellow "brights" - as members of the atheist community fondly describe themselves - mistakenly identify with science.
Berlinski is right to focus on the fact that 20th-century atheist states were as complicit in crimes against humanity as any religion has been in the past
The first of these targets is dispatched with in a barrage of devastating arguments. Berlinski quotes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg as declaring "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Berlinski comments on this, forcefully and unanswerably: "Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, not the Vatican."
Nothing infuriates atheists more than the observation that people who scorned traditional religion in all its varieties were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the last century. But Berlinski is pointing to an undeniable truth. The former Soviet Union was an atheist regime from the moment of its inception to the day it collapsed. Applying Marx's philosophy, its leaders looked forward to a time when religion would be eradicated from human life. Lenin and Stalin's "liquidation" of remnants of the old society - in plain words, the mass murder of tens of millions of people, artists and intellectuals, peasants and workers, priests and rabbis - was not done only with the aim of maintaining power.
