Berlinski on Atheism's "Scientific Pretensions"

From David Berlinski's book, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions-- by way of the intro essay in the Readings section of the April 2008 Harpers...

Berlinski is a gifted writer and an impressive logician and philosopher.

Since the great scientific revolution of the West was set in motion in the 17th century, we have vouchsafed four powerful and profound scientific theories-- Newtonian mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. These are isolated miracles, great mountain peaks surrounded by a range of low, furry foothills....

These splendid artifacts of the human imagination have made the world more mysterious than it ever was. We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from a "warm little pond." The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no other theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found. On these and other points as well, the great scientific theories have lapsed. The more sophisticated the theories, the more inadequate they are. This is a reason to cherish them. They have enlarged and not diminished our sense of the sublime.

If science stands opposed to religion, it is not because of anything contained in either the premises or the conclusions of the great scientific theories...Confident assertions by scientists that in the privacy of their chambers they have demonstrated that God does not exist have nothing to do with science, and even less do with God's existence...

It is wrong, the mathematician W.K. Clifford affirmed, “always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” I am guessing that Clifford believed what he wrote, but what evidence he had for his belief he did not say. Something like Clifford's injunction forms the premise in a popular argument for the inexistence of God. If God exists, then His existence is a scientific claim, no different in kind from the claim that there is tungsten to be found in Bermuda...If after scouring Bermuda for tungsten we cannot find any of the stuff, then we give up the claim. By parity of reasoning, if it is wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence, and if there is insufficient evidence for the existence of God, then it must be wrong to believe in his existence.

By what standards might we determine that faith in science is reasonable but faith in God is not?...

Perhaps this is because there are no such rules. The concept of sufficient evidence is infinitely elastic. It depends on context. Taste plays a role, as do intuition, intellectual sensibility...experience, and much besides....

Evidence in engineering has little to do with evidence in art, and while everyone can agree that it is wrong to go off half-baked, half-cocked, or half-right, what counts as being baked, cocked, or right is simply too variable to suggest a plausible general principle....

In the face of experience, W.K. Clifford's asseveration must be seen for what it is: a moral principle covering only the most artificial of cases. The existence of God is not one of them...

The philosopher Michael Devitt thus argues that "there is only one way of knowing, the empirical way that is the basis of science." An argument against religious belief follows at once on the assumptions that theology is not science and belief is not knowledge. If by means of this argument it also follows that neither mathematics, the law, nor the greater part of ordinary human discourse has a claim on our epistemological allegiance, they must be accepted as casualties of war.

The idea that we must turn to the sciences in order to assess our religious beliefs owes much to the popular conviction that so long as we are turning, where else are we to turn to? The proper response is a question in turn. Why turn at all? And if we must turn, why turn in the wrong direction?...

The claim that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific question stands on a destructive dilemma: If by science one means the great theories of mathematical physics, then the demand is unreasonable. We cannot treat any claim in this way. There is no other intellectual activity in which theory and evidence have reached this stage of development.

If, on the other hand, the demand means merely that one should treat the existence of God as the existence of anything would be treated, then we must accept the fact that in life as it is lived beyond mathematical physics, the evidence is fragmentary, lost, partial, and inconclusive. We do what we can. We grope. We see glimmers.

In science, as in so many other areas of life, faith is its own reward.