If I were to sum up this book in one short paragraph, and this would be very unfair of me, I would borrow the statement, a quote, that I was so impressed with from the book I have just finished and offered a review of: Alister McGrath's book "Heresy"
“For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.” Austin Farrer “The Christian Apologist”(1904-1968)David Berlinski holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is the bestselling author of such books as A Tour of the Calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm, and Newtons Gift. David Berlinski is a self described agnostic that is most indignant with the presumptions and propaganda that has burst forth from the militant atheistic scientists and philosophers' agenda to rid the world-firstly of any sense of credibility in religion and secondly squash any notion that there is a God.
This book is an enormous help to theists because he isn't one. This means that if there were an axe to grind it wouldn't necessarily be on behalf of religion. What really seems to irk him is the extravagant and unfounded claims that science has done away with the need of, or disproved God- and that morally, science and mankind can do very well without him anyway, thanks very much. His book is full of rational argument and not a little does he pour scorn on some of the overrated claims of atheistic science. The reason I quote from Farrer above is that though he does not himself subscribe to theism, his arguments at the very least leave theism in a very healthy atmosphere in which faith may be fostered and indeed flourish.
Typical of his forceful expression p35:
"If the universe is as scientists say it is , then what scope remains for statements about right or wrong, good or bad? What are we to say about evil and great wickedness? whatever statements we might make are obviously not about gluons, muons, or curved space and time. "The problem," the philosopher Simon Blackburn has written, "is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are a part."
Blackburn is, of course, convinced that the chief task at hand in facing this question- his chief task, in any case- "is above all to refuse appeal to a supernatural order". It is a strategy that merits admiration for the severity of mind it expresses. It is rather as if an accomplished horseman were to decide that his chief task were to learn to ride without a horse.
If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong. good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.
These are familiar questions in philosophy, and if they have been long asked, they have remained long unanswered. David Hume asked in the eighteenth century whether ought could be derived from is, and concluded that it could not: There is a gap between what is and what ought to be, The world of fact and the world of value are disjoint. They have nothing to say to one another. The ensuing chilliness between what is and what ought to be has in the twentieth century grown glacial. The more that science reveals what is, the less it reveals what ought to be. The traditional biblical view - that what ought to be is a matter chiefly of what God demands- thus stand on his existence, the very point challenged by scientific atheism."
Some of what Berlinski says, reminds me so much of what others have said. G.K. Chesterton in characteristic wit said:
"Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say. "At least one of the major reasons that scientists like Richard Dawkins who manipulate their science to promote their atheistic worldview are so popular among the masses is the very situation that Berlinski points out above. Their nihilist, reductionist view of humanity gives the perfect excuse to live as one pleases with no further moral shackle than the burden of choosing what lifestyle they please. All references to morality are thus preferences, all prescriptive sense of morality is drowned in a morass of relativism.
If deriving an ought from an is remains an insurmountable problem for the materialist- it is no less problematic for these denizens of science than the problem of giving an account for reason itself, or consciousness, indeed for any of the metaphysical properties of humanity.
One of the most difficult tasks of the Christian apologist is made more accessible by the work of this refreshing book. There is, thanks to the word of influential and clever sounding crusading atheists of the scientific and philosophic variety, an overarching perception that faith and science are at irreconcilable odds. The whole world, it seems accepts the neutrality of science, and of course all good science is morally neutral, but- and this is an important distinction to make- and Berlinski does this well; the ethical neutrality of science is one thing- the moral neutrality of the scientific community is quite another. What this points to of course is that all scientists are human before ever they were scientists, and unfortunately they take their moral assumptions and read them into their science and from which we get such misguided and uncertain ethical systems.
It has been said that God wrote not one but two books, therefore -not one, but two revelations- the revelation of God found in nature, and the revelation of God found in scripture. The first book says nothing about the moral nature of God, from this we get the necessity of the second book for knowing his moral qualities. If these atheistic scientists were theologians it would be evident -in their reading of nature- that what comes from them is not a result of competent exegesis- but a defiant eisegesis.
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