What You Ought to Be Reading
By: Chicago Tribune Staff
Chicago Tribune
April 13, 2008
Link to Original Article
Original Article
In "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretentions" (Crown Forum, 2008), David Berlinski takes on the growing crop of smugly swashbuckling non-believers, including the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and teaches them a thing or two: namely, that dismissing religion doesn't make you sound tough or "scientific." It makes you sound small-minded and illogical.
Believe what you will, argues Berlinski, a Princeton PhD and self-labeled "secular Jew" who has taught math and physics, but don't act as if atheism is superior to religious belief. "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 ..." writes the author, whose previous books include the bewitching "A Tour of the Calculus" (1996).
This short but forceful polemic will infuriate and inflame – Berlinski has become a heretic to many, by repeatedly questioning the scientific establishment – and will probably start arguments from here to Paris, where the author lives. But he can take the heat.
