Difference between revisions of "George Gilder"

The pseudo-religion of atheistic scientism that Berlinski exposes in the Devil's Delusion reflects the tendency of scientists to become what Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called "barbarians of specialization." Knowing much about one thing gives them confidence to pontificate grandly about other subjects on which their expertise is irrelevant, or to inflate their own little patches of expertise into "grand unified theories." Knowing more and more about less and less, they finally rise into the nation's TV airhead empyrean chattering vacuously about anything and everything like George Clooney or Al Gore, Carl Sagan or James Watson, Richard Dreyfuss or Steven Weinberg--actors, politicians, scientists...in the giddy glow of the tube who can tell them apart in their common babble of moral relativism and anti-capitalist eschatology?

 

 

Now Dawkins has met his nemesis in Berlinski, a Princeton PhD, secular Jew, and a former fellow at the Institute des Hautes Scientifique in France. Now with the Discovery Institute, Berlinski commands a range of scientific disciplines and philosophical skills that project him well beyond the camp of Ortega's barbarians. The polymathic author of several formidable books on mathematics and logic, he in recent years has written a series of incandescent essays on biology, physics, psychology, and mathematics in Commentary magazine that have subsequently evoked an overflow of dumbfounded responses in its letters pages (Berlinski's replies are feloniously sharp). The Devil's Delusion makes the compelling argument that the anti-God fetish of modern science has driven many scientists into a mad nihilism that has crippled their scientific work as well.