David Berlinski, Stick To What You Know
To start this post off, I’ll refer you to an excellent article by my good friend Aaron, the YouTube Skeptic. Watch the video. It’s really something. David Berlinski explains how, basically, evolution couldn’t have happened because the odds are against it happening. A textbook example of post hoc, illogical reasoning.
If any of you have checked out my “Books” section, you’ll have noticed that I’ve just started reading “A Tour Of The Calculus,” by David Berlinski. I’d actually purchased this book a few years ago. Didn’t really know who Berlinski was. This is strangely ironic, as I had just finished reading a book by another Creationist nutcase, out of my own choosing. And now, out of pure coincidence, I’ve found myself reading Berlinski!
I had no idea as to the degree of Berlinski’s ignorance, or willingness to be intellectually dishonest. Not only that, but Berlinski is apparently just good at math. He’s written a few books and articles, but has not really contributed anything to the mathematical community. Basically, he just knows how to do math.
Aaron makes a great analogy to Berlinski’s reasoning process as it concerns evolution:
I’ll draw a simple analogy to prove my point. If finding out how we got the diversity of life on earth as we now know it was winning the lottery; then genetics is the winning ticket. Genetics explains how things are related, how they change, how often they change, etc. So, with that in mind here is what Berlinski would like to do – You bought your lottery ticket, watched with anticipation to see if you won and you did! You go down to the lottery office to cash in your winnings, but there sits David Berlinski. Mr. Berlinski looks at your ticket and says, “That’s interesting, but let’s look at it purely from a mathematical stand point to find out if you won. My calculations show that the probability of you winning the lottery were astronomical so you don’t win – couldn’t have happened.
And that’s what we’re left with from this mathematical genius. Not, “Did it happen?” But, “Could it have happened?” Post hoc reasoning. Berlinski bases his belief in Creationism on the odds of something happening, not whether or not it did happen.
Evolution is not a math problem. So, Berlinski, stick to what you know! You’re not an evolutionary biologist. Here’s a mathematical problem for you: How many logical fallacies are in in your reasoning process?
In conclusion, I’m only part-way through this book, and have yet to be exposed to any Creationism nonsense. But, it’s still too soon to make any predictions. If I was going on the odds of it happening, I’m willing to bet that “A Tour Of The Calculus” will give me a tour of Jesus, or some crap like that. But, I’m only basing that on the odds of it happening, a hallmark of Berlinski’s logic. It’s important to be consistent, right?
On that note, read a book.
I think for the most part his writing about math trustworthy since he can’t bring God into it. I didn’t bother to make the point that at the beginning of the video he says he blows out of the water that ID proponents are fundamental Christians cause he is neither-well o.k,you’re Jewish,not Christian.
I got my first uneducated hate comment. “your gay”.The gay belongs to me? I don’t understand.Haha
I read Berlinski’s article in COMMENTARY, “The God of
the Gaps”…
(for full text)
http://dakowski.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=494&Itemid=48
…on , ironically, the very night of my Easter– the
most important day of my religion, for it is then that
Jesus is believed by us to have proven that HE indeed
is the Son of God; and so we utter in greeting each
other: “Christ has arisen”; to which we respond: “He
truly has arisen.” Unfortunately, our theologians
could neither get together on the date of Easter,
except once every few years, for our fellow
Christians, nor on the date of Passover for our fellow
Jews. Thus, it is here, in what is the key method of
science, MEASUREMENT, that there is a Biblical flaw in
our faith– MEASUREMENT…the stuff Berlinski’s bank
account is made of.
Berlinski is not only arguing for doubt in Darwinian
evolution, but he is also INSISTING on the certainty
of GOD in man’s image (the true logical sequence, for
we all have seen man but few if any saw God). In doing
so– to this believer– he reads and sounds like an
adolescent sophist on a Baptist high school debating
team (or is it Regents University?) as he bases his
case on snip and cut quotes from defensive and angry
scientists and singles out for his rage fellow
adolescent sophist Christopher [what a nice Christian
name] Hitchens. The latter has been the darling of the
neocons and their ideological “World War IV” in the
Middle East, but I guess not for Berlinski, the man of
God in man’s image ideology…or is he also a neocon?
Alas, at his best, Berlinski only reiterates the need
for philosophical supervision of science….and,
presumably of mathematics, applied or contrived, to
which I say AMEN, bravo! Here, here– yes indeed,
evolution NEEDS very much philosophical supervision–
alas, here Berlinski can quote no contrarians for none
exist among scientists. And most certainly, as a
neurobiologist myself, ALL BRAIN SCIENCE DATA needs
severe philosophical scrutiny. For that God gave us
Gerald Edelman and many, many other older sages of
science who no longer litter the libraries with data
but philosophically extract ideas from that of others.
Yet, I urge Berlinski to heed the caution of
neurophilosopher William Calvin and be weary of the
“janitor’s dream” of fundamentals ridden particle
physicists in the basement trying to conjure up what
goes on in the penthouse of the brain where love, hate
and ejaculation are enrapturing. No, Mr. Berlinski,
nerves do not “twitch,” but they depolarize and
conduct current. And what they do in assemblies we can
barely mathematically model as theory rather than
fact. Right now, evolution of the mind, like the Big
Bang, is all models in search of falsification tests,
much like the theory of eleven universes by a very
attractive Harvard theoretical physicist, Lisa
Randall. She may be a lot cuter than Darwin ever was,
but offers no less a theory in search of falsification
tests. Though science is really the inverse of a
cancer test: you can’t be sure about cancer until a
test comes out positive and about science except when
an experiment comes out negative, these are not
dreamed up, as Berlinski would have us believe in
ignorance. Since all these branches of science are
incomplete works in progress, should we settle for
“God” as a totem blocking their path to adventurous
scientific investigation?
Berlinski’s vague amorphous God cloud substituting for
science is the Old and New Testaments as FACT. That
may be fine for the neocon materialists in their quest
to “re-establish” Israel (meaning: “defier of God”) in
Jerusalem as Zionist kings of the Middle East (what
else could they ask for in their waining years now
that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin– the Three Who Made A
Revolution of their youth are all dead?) but it fails
to define a moral compass for mankind, given that the
Bible makes us all look like nothing but circumcised
apes vs. the uncircumcised apes.
Neurobiology is a young and maturing experimental
science, a term Berlinski failed to consider in his
epiphany against it. Evolution is actually history
helped with clues from genetics, another young
experimental science. Decades from now genetics may be
able to tell us what are the chances that Berlinski
may go mad; but certainly now it cannot tell us if he
is mad…Does that mean we should stop research into
the neurobiology of madness and just leave him to
clergy instead? We tried that for centuries and all we
got were exorcises, Freud and Lewis!
Berlinski’s COMMENTARY article is a fraud because it
slanders as anti-God the very science that makes no
pretensions of knowing anything about God. Yet
Berlinski asserts God’s divine dominion and that we
are made in His image as if he knows best because his
revelation came to him upon eating mushrooms or
something (he gives us no clue).
Berlinski fails– nay, AVOIDS– answering the
question: is there ONTOLOGY without ONTOGENY? No, Mr.
Berlinski, no Amazonian Indian has, as far as I know,
lived a full life in the jungle AND THEN moved on to
Cambridge to write a learned and literate PhD thesis
on civilization from bottom up and from top down. And,
no closer has Berlinski come to a chimp than I to
Jesus, so there’s little he can say with authority–
other than Chomsky’s hypothesis based on “think
experiments”– about the chimp’s non-verbal vs.
Berlinski verbal type cognition. Again, BEING IS
ACQUIRED through a neotony of prolonged maturation–
there is no ontology without ontogeny– not
necessarily a capriciously God given one for the
circumcised but rather one acquired by nature-nurture
interactions developing into intelligence.
I can’t admire Blinks’s faith, given that it is a
payed-per-word assault on Hitch en’s attempts to make
a living selling books. Both come off looking like a
not too interesting boxing match between two blind
fighters. But I do resent the game the noons played
ALLEGEDLY (???) on behalf of Israel, exploiting the
so-called “Christian Zionists” whom the noons laugh at
privately as “dumb gym.” The dumb noons don’t realize
that the domestic agenda of these gos is a Christian–
of their kind only– America that would eventually
deny Blinks and his Nikon fellows citizenship unless
they suddenly find Christ. In my old age I was
planning to be a philosopher too like my beloved
Edeline and Calvin, not to put myself at risk hiding
Jews in my armories from the Hagee-ilk Inquisition.
That’s why I find Berlinski and the neocons and their
World War IV ideology so outrageous– as a scientist,
as a Christian and as an American by choice, not
chance.
I hope Berlinski’s faith in God eventually saves him
from the high probability scourge of Alzheimer’s
better than can our neuroscience to date. As for me, I
still think God would rather I research the damned
disease rather than just pray wishing that He not
inflict it on me but on my pesky neighbor instead.
Daniel E. Teodoru
I read A Tour of the Calculous several years ago and I though it was pretty good. There was nothing about religion or creationism in it. I was also quite surprised to find out what an idiot Berlinski turned out to be. I also have his book on Newton which I haven’t read yet…
David Berlinski is a Straussian Zionist. He apparently identifies as a secular Jew or “Judeo-agnostic” though he sides with the loony fringe of the Christian Evangelical right wing. As with Ben Stein, is Berlinski really a creationist or does he pull the act. Berlinski falls in the same category as Ben Stein, “Doctor” Laura Schlessinger, and Michael Medved. All of the aforementioned are Straussian Jews who would betray their own people for their own political ambitions.
First off, lest you confuse something I post as anti-Semitism, please distinguish normal Jews and the more mainstream Zionist moderates from their treacherous brethren. I acknowledge that there are many Jews, secular and traditionalist, who are genuine and decent people. However, individuals like Stein, Berlinski, and Medved are no better than the Jewish capos who betrayed their own people from the ghettos to the death camps during the Holocaust. Such “Jews” (in name only) as Ben Stein and David Berlinski, to say nothing of Medved, Savage, or Schlessinger, are scum of the lowest caliber and they do not speak for Jews in general.
To understand the ultra-Zionist mindset of many (though by no means all) Jewish neoconservatives, one must understand Leo Strauss. It was Strauss, an early 20th century Zionist belonging to the right-wing of the movement, who helped formulate the neoconservative ideology. Strauss was a classicist, who was dissilusioned with modern civilization, believing Fascism and Communism, the right and left wings of totalitarianism to be an inevitable consequence of the eventual decay of classical liberalism. He sought inspiration in such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, and Machiavelli, particularly Plato’s “Noble Lie.” It is clear that Leo Strauss had a hatred for science, democracy, secularism, contemporary art and philosophy, republican statescraft, capitalism, socialism, and other byproducts of the Enlightenment. A reactionary to the core, Strauss believed that civilization must revert to a high-tech version of the Feudal Ages with an elite ruling over masses kept in ignorance. Though Strauss was a bonafide atheist, he hated cultural secularization, believing religion to be a useful TOOL for social control.
All this makes me wonder whether Berlinski and Stein and others REALLY believe all their creationist/ID garbage, or if it is all a front. After all, ID is the “noble lie.” In true Straussian fashion Berlinski pretends at being an Evangelical Christian to lead the neocons’ Evangelical useful idiots as the Pied Piper lead the rats.
For all of the populist trash these Straussian Zionists whip up, other than elitism-disguised-as-anti-elitism, appeals to racism and homophobia, and rampant anti-intellectialism, there does not appear to be anything harmful coming from them. However, the influence of the Jewish Straussians on Bible Belt Evangelicals should be cautiously monitored. Especially when they press the neoconservative coalition towards global wars.