Atheists

David Berlinski:

.... It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg has acknowledged that this is what the great scientists believed: But we know better, he has insisted, because we know more.

This prompts the obvious question: Just what have scientists learned that might persuade the rest of us that they know better? It is not, presumably, the chemistry of Boron salts that has done the heavy lifting. ....

....[T]here is Darwin’s theory of evolution. It has been Darwin, Richard Dawkins remarked, that has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

A much better case might be made in the other direction. It is atheism that makes it possible for a man to be an intellectually fulfilled Darwinist. In the documentary Expelled, one of those curious exercises in which some scientists, at least, say what they really think, Ben Stein interviews a number of Darwinian biologists eager to evade the evidence whenever possible or to ignore it when not. Rich in self-satisfaction, Dawkins appears at the film’s end.

How did life on earth arise?

The question, Dawkins acknowledges, is very difficult.

Perhaps the seeds of life were sent here from outer space?

It could well be.

Or by a vastly superior intelligence?

Well, yes.

Questions and their answers follow one another, but in the end Stein says nothing. There is no absurdity Dawkins is not prepared to embrace so long as he can avoid a transcendental inference. .... [more]

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