David Berlinski, agnostic: latest 2018 interview (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, March 30, 2020, 18:22 (1478 days ago) @ dhw

From a Sunday night program transcript. A gift to dhw:

https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/david-berlinski-on-the-link-between-evolution-scienc...

BERLINSKI: Suppose you were coming from outer space, you're a biologist, right? You come to the Earth and you listen to a long lecture about Darwin, the immense importance of Darwinian biology, but then, you open your own eyes, say you're from Mars, you open your eyes.

What are the two things that would most strike you about living systems on the face of the Earth? Not the Darwinian rhetoric, but it's just the evidence of your own eyes. One is that all life is related. There's no question about that.

Biochemistry is the same throughout life. All life has very, very many of its properties in common. There's one living system on the face of the planet. Not a multitude of species, one living system. That's the first thing you'd notice.

The second thing you'd notice, if you are honest is that there is a vast inseparable distinction between two kinds of living systems -- human beings and all the rest. That is something that's rarely noticed, rarely emphasized.

The distance between a human being and our nearest chimpanzee-like ancestors, common ancestors is much, much, much greater than the difference between a chimpanzee and a flower. We're talking about a bifurcation in the manifold of Biology. Human beings on one side, the rest of the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom on the other.

These are facts that I think that any untroubled observer, and by untroubled, I mean someone who is not previously adhered to any kind of ideology such as Darwinism. Would it once recognize life is connected? It's in some sense one living system, but profoundly divided between human beings and all the rest.

That's the first step towards some sort of system of reconciliation because it prompts the inevitable question. "Hey, how come? Why are human beings so different? Why do they organize themselves differently? Why do they have mathematics, literature? Why do they speak to one another? Why do they have creative thoughts?

A chimpanzee is probably a lovable animal, but nobody ever asked the chimpanzee a question that was possible for the chimpanzee to answer. So, these are I would say, orthogonal to the main axis of ideology.

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BERLINSKI: Darwinism is a particular kind of scientific doctrine. It's largely anecdotal. It's very far removed from Physics or Mathematics and it plays a certain role with the ceremonies of democratic life and it has played that role for half a century or so. But, of course, it's like everything else, it's changing. It's undergoing change because of the intense intellectual pressure that's being brought on any scientific theory dealing with these profound questions.

For example, we know perfectly well that questions about the origins of life from the standpoint of 2018 are hopeless. We do not understand how life emerged from whatever muck it did emerge. We are simply unable to make a coherent chemical account.

Jim Tour, a very good synthetic chemist at Rice University has written about this, for "Inference," the journal that I am editing. And he says, it's time to call for a moratorium in our origins of life research. It's not going anywhere. That's one thing.

***

So, you get somebody, for example, I think his first name is Donald Fisher at Stanford. A topnotch physicist and I have seen a preprint of his, and he said, "Well, you know, Darwin has a very, very interesting theory, but it has no quantitative properties. It's not like a theory in Physics," and there is a kind of collective heart attack among the Darwinian biologists, not like Physics, not like gravity, say it isn't so, but it isn't so.

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BERLINSKI: Look, the struggle begins by making an important distinction. I can say, I believe there is no God. It's one kind of commitment and that's essentially an atheist position.

I believe for whatever reasons that God does not exist, but I can say in a much more ameliorative sense, I don't believe that God exists. Quite different. I withdraw some form of assent.

I believe God does not exist, it's not the case that I believe God exists. I believe the proposition God does not exist, I can defend that. That's the atheist speaking.

I would say, I don't have an intense belief with respect to God's existence. It hasn't been vouched saved me. It's not the case. It's not the case that I believe that God exists, but I'm not tempted to say I believe that He does not exist. I'm tempted to only temporize, and I think that is fundamentally the way most people in a secular society think.

***

But yes, I think dogmatic atheism, the movement of atheism is an embarrassment in contemporary thought and I think I'm pretty much alone in thinking that. It is a very popular, a very effervescent movement. There are whole societies consecrated to upholding atheism, and of course, the first thing they do when they gather together at ecumenical devotion is form factions and start hurling anathemas...

Comment: A true agnostic. His first quote is pure Adler without Adler's conclusion