atheism

Which Secular Superstition Do You Believe?

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival…On this model we should expect…that superstitions and other non-factual beliefs will locally evolve — change over generations … . —Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion Not long ago at a local pub, an acquaintance interrupted a conversation Read More ›

Don’t Write Off Religion Just Yet

This article, published by The Globe and Mail, contains a review of Discovery Institute Center for Science & Culture Senior Fellow David Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion: 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. The rest of Read More ›

Where the Evidence Leads

This review appears in the May 2008 issue of The American Spectator. There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese (HarperOne, 256 pages, $24.95) Antony Flew has long been my favorite atheist. That may be an odd thing for the son of a minister to say, but then again, Read More ›

Delusions of Grandeur

The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensionsby David Berlinski Crown Forum, 237 pages, $23.95 It is at once lamentable and understandable that academics, wishing applause from other academics, proffer far-fetched theses. After all, no one receives applause (or tenure) with commonsensical hypotheses. When supposedly divined from capital-S “Science,” however, such theses are taken all too seriously. David Berlinski’s The Read More ›

closed red blinds
Red light shining onto closed red blinds creating a pattern of red and black lines in a semicircle
Image licensed via Adobe Stock

Blinkered Sages

David Berlinski’s new book describes the remarkable extent to which the dominant religion of the intelligentsia is now “science.” This new religion — which is based on atheism and materialism — is actually better termed “scientism,” since its religious claims far overreach its scientific content. Scientism reflects the tendency of scientists to become what Ortega y Gasset called “barbarians of Read More ›

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An astronaut space walking
Photo by NASA on Unsplash

The Scientific Embrace of Atheism

At sometime after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first entered space, stories began to circulate that he had been given secret instructions by the Politburo. Have a look around, they told him. Suitably instructed, Gagarin looked around. When he returned without having seen the face of God, satisfaction in high circles was considerable. The commissars having vacated the scene, it Read More ›

Is the “Science” of Richard Dawkins Science Fiction?

Atheist Richard Dawkins is hopping mad at the makers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Dawkins accuses the filmmakers of “lying for Jesus” because they make it seem that he believes in intelligent design and space aliens. Dawkins is an outspoken critic of intelligent design (ID). In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins defined biology as “the study of complicated Read More ›

The Divine Comedy: Dawkins’ Disco Inferno

Richard Dawkins has got himself in a bit of a pickle and, in an effort to wash off the brine, now appears to be lathering up mountains of foam. In an article in the LA Times (see here), he is at pains to distance himself from remarks he made in the newly released movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Toward the Read More ›

Agnostic takes New Atheists to Task for Trying to Hijack Science

The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions By David Berlinski (Crown Forum Books April 2008 Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement– — one that now Read More ›

Photo by Flavio Gasperini

Darwin of the Gaps

On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton announced the completion of the Human Genome Project, which had just deciphered the sequence of DNA in a human cell. “Today,” he said, “we are learning the language in which God created life.” At the president’s side was Francis Collins, director of the project, who had helped to write Clinton’s speech. “It is Read More ›