As I wade through the sludge of recent anti-atheist tracts, I keep trying to think of ways to make my reviews amusing. For this review of David Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion, I think I can sum it up this way: Berlinksi is one of the mathematicians my mother warned me about. Mom has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and a fair amount of experience in academia, and one observation she decided to pass on to my brother and I is that physicists tend to think they’re better than everyone else because what they do is more fundamental and mathematically rigorous, but they can be pretty clueless because while biologists have to understand chemistry and physics, physicists just have to understand physics. Substitute “mathematician” for “physicist” and you’ve basically got David Berlinski.

In the preface, Berlinski tells us that science has four great achievements: Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s electromagnetic field theory, relativity, and quantum mechanics. Nothing else is worth anything to Berlinski, he especially has it in for evolution and scientific attempts to understand the human mind. The reasoning is something like “I am a mathematician, some parts of physics flatter me by using elegant mathematics, but most science uses messy statistics and qualitative arguments, and those don’t flatter me so much, so those other branches of science must be worthless, and if Dawkins and co. like them, there must be something wrong with those people.”

Thus, we get a long rant in chapter 8 against evolutionary psychology, which ends with this laugh line: “There is no reason to pay attention to Steven Pinker.” At it’s obvious that Berlinski hasn’t paid attention, and doesn’t even understand the views he’s trying to attack. He doesn’t seem to understand what evolutionary psychologists think about how nature and nurture work together to produce the personality of any given human, he assumes it must be one or the other. His rants about the evils of the 20th century reveal he hasn’t read Pinker on tribal warfare.

Most notably, his marveling at the human ability to do math shows an ignorance of the fact that humans are pretty awful at math, and lack the specialized brain circuitry which manages such tricky (from a roboticist’s point of view) tasks as walking and talking. Berlinski wants there to be an insoluble mystery for evolution here–what’s the evolutionary advantage of being good at math?–and fails to see that we get exactly what we should expect if evolution were true: human beings with an uncanny knack for day to day tasks and an incompetence at arithmetic that would embarrass a pocket calculator (if only the pocket calculator had our sophisticated circuitry for thinking about social status). Another laugh line comes when Berlinski says: “A chain of physical causes is thus not obviously useful in explaining how the human mind imposes itself on matter.” No, it’s not obvious, which is why you should learn something about a topic before spouting off about it.

A lot of the rest is cliche: citing Richard Lewontin, a similar appeal to the authority of one C. F. von Weizsacker, Hitler was an atheist (because if you do bad things, you don’t believe in God), science is faith based, scientists are irrational if they think supposed proofs of God aren’t (specific reference to fine-tuning here), cosmological argument, and so on. I like his weird spin on that last point: “If God must exist, the question why God does exist answers itself. Must is must.” Here, Berlinski seems to think that having an argument for why god “must” exist (by premises of the argument) is the same as explaining why he exists, in the sense that is required for the cosmological argument to make any sense. Sloppy, and weird.

But aside from Berlinski’s weird vendetta against most physics, there’s his version of the “atheism is” game. In Berlinski’s case, he repeatedly accuses atheists of believing that there is no such thing as truth, apparently because many think some facts (about morality, cosmology, whatever) just are, with nothing more to underlie them. His account of the Euthyphro problem is this: “To the question of what makes the laws of moral life true, there are just three answers: God, logic, and nothing.” Berlinski goes on to throw atheists who think morality just is in with moral relativists, because in his mind, no further explanation for a fact = no fact.

I think we need a new name for this fallacy. I propose “homeopathy of ideas,” from homeopathy, belief in mystical connections between superficially similar things. For Berlinski and those like him, the superficial similarity between two ideas (no further basis for morality and no morality) means that if you can dismiss one, you can dismiss the other. We get a similar treatment for various multiverse theories: the idea that what’s true in one universe might not be true in another gets equated with belief that there is no truth whatsoever.

Okay, ’nuff of that. I’m an hour overdue for hitting the gym.