I think I'll skip it

Berlinski is probably the world's greatest expert on pretentiousness, to the point that his name and the word are practically synonyms.

Yes.

You are right PZ; don't bother to read that crap but take
it for granted that there is no need to do so as others
have and it just pisses them off. I will definitely quit
my subscription to Harper's when it expires. What a freaking nerve putting that crud in this magazine when there are so many who will gladly accept mindless garbage.
Mad Magazine would love to have it. As I said before, I
don't pay to have to read crap I abhor; Free Inquiry is
offering stuff I want to read and pay for. Screw you
Harper's; next you'll be hiring Ben Stein to editorialize
in all departments. Crap!

Certainly we've already read enough Berlinski to tell us enough about his "thought" without us reading anything more.

Will he at least stop claiming to be agnostic? It was never believable, considering what a Platonist he was, and surely any true agnostic wouldn't be prattling about the "pretensions" of atheism.

The real question, of course, is what is wrong with Harper's. Do they just print any creationist shit that comes along (basically that's the perspective from which he "tackles atheism" as far as I can see), provided that some Ivy-leaguer wrote it? I mean, do they have any standards at all, other than pretensiousness (and no, I would not mind if they presented arguments against atheism from someone who can think)?

For a while they published creationist lies from Bethell as well, which makes me think that they do not have any standards worth mentioning.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

Makes perfect sense. What good is science if it doesn't explain angels, demons, (or pixie-dust), or other mysteries that are Not Of This World?!

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick. Contributed by Larry Reyka.

And good riddance to that freaking Buckley who tried to
wow everybody with his crappy screed "god And Man At Yale",
which I almost finished years ago but could not as I was
finally sloughing off all religious crap and just could
not stomach reading anything that stank of religion, of
which I hold the bible in extreme contempt. All you bible
readers who insist on claiming this book as literature will
never persuade me that it is this and not a waste of brain
cells to absorb such insane crud.

I tried to read this nonsensical screed and part way through was reminded of Wolfgang Pauli's comment that "This is so bad, it's not even wrong." I thought of sending a letter to the editor, but decided it wouldn't be worth the effort.

"any true agnostic wouldn't be prattling about the 'pretensions' of atheism."

Don't be so sure. There are plenty of agnostics that imagine they've got the reasonable middle-ground and everyone else is irrational.

Dr. Berlinski may best be described as a vast emptiness surrounded by an education.

"any true agnostic wouldn't be prattling about the 'pretensions' of atheism."

Don't be so sure. There are plenty of agnostics that imagine they've got the reasonable middle-ground and everyone else is irrational.

OK, I'll give you that.

Maybe it is the proper position for pretentious windsocks like Berlinski.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick.

Good ol' Philip K., now there's a real authority on reality. ;)

Whew, what a relief! Thought I was losing my sanity there for a while. My first reaction when I started to read this article my new issue of Harpers was to become nauseous and then I reflexively threw the magazine across the room. Perhaps a glass of Glenfiddich will calm my gag reflex upon a second attempt to read this issue.

A few years back, I wrote a piece in my local newspaper that was critical of ID. In reply I got a nasty anonymous message on my voicemail that I'm nearly certain was from Berlinski--anyone who's heard him speak knows his distinctive, sneering drawl. The number that showed up on my caller ID was also the kind of strange code you get when someone calls from overseas--and (at least then) Berlinski was living in Paris. I confronted him by email, and while he of course denied it, he did seem fairly taken aback.

I may still have the original voicemail message and related emails, if anyone thinks it would be fun to play forensic detective...

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick.

Good ol' Philip K., now there's a real authority on reality. ;)

Yeah, I was kinda thinking, what about these voices in my head? They sure as hell aren't going away.

Well, okay, I don't really have voices in my head, but for those who do, that screws up such a definition, or at least brings up some serious questions about what one means by "reality." That is to say, maybe the voices are "real" in the sense that they correlate with actual brain events, but they're not "real" in the sense that they correspond with some entity other than oneself, as the truly deluded person believes that they do.

I think that "reality" comes closer to true meaning if it is something that various people can perceive. Like that Nash guy (Wonderful Mind), the phantom people who he saw didn't go away, but he didn't think they were "real" because other people didn't see them, and furthermore, the little girl never grew up as "real people" did.

Some things don't go away, but they don't become "real" in the usual sense just because they remain. Errors also remain.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

practically synonyms

HA, HA, ss-stop, you are getting too good at this.

these voices in my head ... Errors also remain.

Well, I do think you point to a problem of sorts, but as the saying goes, plural of anecdotes aren't data. Observation of say delusions is in principle repeatable, uncertainty is quantifiable. But it is still hard, as your argument leads in to, a limitation in knowledge.

Also errors in theories, they have not so much quantifiability. But at least they are temporary. :-P

Harper's has been publishing crap at least since the horrible article on how HIV doesn't cause AIDs from a few years ago. I tried to cancel my subscription after that only to find that I had a 'redundant' subscription, so I still get it each month. It should stop coming soon.

I read the Berlinski piece, mostly out of sad curiosity, and it is crap. As is his tour of the calculus. There are numerous much better math books written for the common man (e.g., The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero and Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, both of which cover much the same ground as Berlinski's steaming pile)

Never mind that the pretentiosness claim of the New Atheists that all existence, life, mind and objective reason can be explained by mindless process has NEVER been demonstrated.

Folks, don't get all huffy about Harper's. The Readings section always has a wide variety of offerings, and I don't think there's any way to draw the conclusion that Harper's shares the point of view expressed. They just put together a bunch of stuff that they think their readers might find interesting.

Actually, a few months ago there was a great piece in the same section that was an excerpt from "Divine Evil" by David Lewis and Philip Kitcher, about how the basic Christian notion of punishment with eternal torment for failure of belief was as monstrous an evil as one could imagine.

Of course, cancel your subscription if you like; it's your money. Just seems to me a pretty silly and narrow-minded attitude to toss out a whole source of information and ideas -- and a pretty good one at that -- because they reprint one article you find disagreeable.

The success of Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus must say something about the eagerness that people have to learn just a little about calculus. The book got good reviews from some nonmathematicians who couldn't tell how weak and incoherent it was. (I dare say some of Tour's fans were completely bewildered after trying to read it but would not dare admit it.) When confronted over at Good Math, Bad Math about one of the egregious episodes in Tour, Berlinski said it was obviously supposed to be a dream sequence, as if that mitigated its foolishness. [Link]

Berlinski is not a mathematician, nor does he have a PhD in math. See this post and the following comments at Not Even Wrong

Never mind that the pretentiosness claim of the New Atheists that all existence, life, mind and objective reason can be explained by mindless process has NEVER been demonstrated.

What? The proof is all around us. You just have to open your eyes and look.

I don't pay to have to read crap I abhor
Oh, come on. It's in the Readings section, first of all, which is not at all the same as if it were a feature article. Harper's prints all kinds of crazy stuff in the Readings, and I, for one, appreciate a media outlet that tries to avoid the "echo chamber" style. I can't stand Berlinski, I hated the piece, but I didn't take it as anything like an endorsement by Harper's; if we can't even stand to read the output of "the other side," how can we claim to have evaluated the arguments on their merits?

As for the piece itself, it might just as well be called "The Pretensions of Scientism," and, as such, is really just an extended straw-man argument, made even more obnoxious by Berlinski's arrogant tone. The argument has no merits, but it didn't hurt me to read it. (The feature article from a while back, mentioned above, about HIV/AIDS, was a great deal more serious a journalistic lapse, imo, but, again, I took it as a bit of sheer contrarianism on the part of Harper's.)

Folks, don't get all huffy about Harper's. The Readings section always has a wide variety of offerings, and I don't think there's any way to draw the conclusion that Harper's shares the point of view expressed.

You're right about the Readings section, but the HIV !-> AIDs article was much worse, and it was after this article that I got all huffy and decided to cancel my subscription. I hadn't been reading it very closely for some time, anyway, so the crappy HIV article was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

Oh my, what a title is that?
The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

Obviously,
Intelligent Design is the notion that life could have been designed by satan.

That should disqualify any IDler from making moral claims.

I have never read Tour of the Calculus but I have read The Advent of the Algorithm, Newton's Gift and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics all of which are on subjects about which I am an expert. All three are total crap and suffer from serious errors that totally disqualify them as history of maths/logic. Berlinski is simply a bad writer and not worth wasting time and effort on.

Re: #13

I had a teacher at Jesuit College Prep make the same objections to Philip K. Dick's quip on reality, plus the argument that disbelief can itself be a belief. Not that he would have any sort of agenda ...

Really, I think the PKD Principle (as I'm going to call it from this day forward) is simply one criterion. How much pseudoscience, quackery, and general stupidity would evaporate if True Believers tried, as a mental exercise, to imagine their particular sacred cows were, in fact, mere generators of bullshit?

Hey PZ: Let's go from that crappy review in Harper's to
another book review in the April issue of Atlantic,
which is by a B R Myers, and who I was hoping might be a
relative of yours as he suits us to a tee.
He is reviewing the book "United Kingdom" by Ian Robinson,
an English author who decries the decline of his language
and his civilization. The author is most erudite and persuavise,but as Myers notes and also "decries", he is a
religionist and expressingly states so in his review!
The author makes a great case on the decline of our
lauguage with this nice remark which is a good reflection
on PZ and his exactness and eloquence for the written word:

"People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant,
are unlikely to think carefully about anything else."

But, as Myers gleans from reading his book, he is offering
his own agenda on religion. Myers remarks: "All the same,
I wish Robinson had made a little less of his faith in this
book." "And it is gratuitous to assert, in such a book as this, that morality is impossible without faith in jesus;
the christian reader does not need to be told, and the non-
christian rolls his eyes." "But if they want to argue from
their castle of faith, they should stay there, and not keep popping out for what they think are appeals to common sense." "There are many things believers and nonbelievers
will never agree on, but when it warns against slovenly
language, the voice of faith sounds to this heathen ear a
lot like the voice of reason." And this remark from the
author himself; "If called upon to defend tradition, I just
appeal to the authority of revelation." Myers remark to
this shit: "That should have been said in the preface, which in its present form leads one to expect a different
kind of book."
Good man, B R Myers! A kindred rationalist to PZ!
The article in the book section of the April ATLANTIC,
"Keeping a Civil Tongue" is on page 93.

Loved what Behe had to say:

"With high style and light-hearted disdain, David Berlinski deflates the intellectual pretensions of the scientific atheist crowd. Maybe they can recite the Periodic Table by heart, but the secular Berlinski shows that this doesn't get them very far in reasoning about much weightier matters."

He might as well just join a seminary.

On a side not, Holbach, I can't ever tell if you're trying to write prose without rhyme scheme or if you just hit enter a lot when you're typing comments. Your comments always come out with small margins.

CJO @ 21 I take issue with your "How can we claim to have
evaluated the arguments on their merits?"
Merits? I checked the several entries defining this word
in the dictionary and every one is anathema to the way
you used it when it comes to evaluating the arguments of
unreason as expressed by religionists. Religion has no merits to my thinking; even the word demerit is too mild
a word for the lack of any worth of religion.

Buckley and Behe both endorsed it.

Well. Thanks for the warning, evolutionnews.org!

zero @ 27 Thanks for reminding me. Yes, I have to break that habit of hitting "Enter", as I do so almost unconsciously.

Yeah, this Berlinski creep is the same IDiot who went to Istanbul last year to plot against evolution and rationality with the Islamists there, as you, PZ, recently pointed out. (Click my handle for my own post on the subject.)

Indeed, why read the Berlinski book? Since when have any of these Johnny One-Note Creos ever changed their hymns? If you've heard one verse, you've heard it all.

Oh, good, I thought I was seeing things. Or something. I got maybe a paragraph into the piece, went "WTF?", skimmed the rest, and gave up in disgust... I'm fairly new to Harper's, but I didn't think that this kind of nonsense was what I'd get.

@ #10 -- Right on. :)

As I posted on the open thread, Harper's is always touch and go on scientific topics. Years ago they published those jaw-gapingly crappy pieces by Bethell, of course, and the last-page "Findings" feature of the past year or so is really pretty bad (also, unlike their "Index," unsourced.)
On the other hand, they've published great stuff by Quammen, McKibbon (OK, not really "science"), etc.
I get a lot out of reading it every month, but mainly for a taste of non-science. I don't think anybody there really gets it.

Berlinski is probably the world's greatest expert on pretentiousness, to the point that his name and the word are practically synonyms.

Gosh. Irony.

With Berlinski I feel safe in assuming that the truly platonic bottom of vain pretention has been reached.
What a useless, yet annoyingly dull vienna-weinee prick he is. Has anyone ever actually finished reading anything over 100 words he has written, other than to rebut his smarmy bullshit?

Shame on Harper's for Celia Farber's HIV denialist article in 2006, and shame on them for frontlining Berlinksi's poo in the Readings section. They don't usually put Readings they think are nonsense up front, nor at such length, so the idea that it's just a case of Harper saying 'wow , readers, look at this craziness we dug up for you' doesn't fly. Someone in editorial thought this was serious stuff, I'd strongly wager.

That said, in the very same issue, there's an engrossing article on the application of evolutionary theory to oncology.

And I think 'Findings' is wonderful...it and the Index are my favorite parts of the magazine. For those unfamiliar, 'Findings' is a single page of one-line precis of the previous month's scientific news; its art is in the sequencing and flow of the lines. It's meant to be amusing and informative, and it always is.

Yes, I have to break that habit of hitting "Enter", as I do so almost unconsciously.

:-o

Where did you get it? On a typewriter?

I read it the other night, well, started it. I'm not an academic, I have no clue who the guy is, and I could barely understand what he was trying to say. I read and comprehended enough to conclude that it was pretension and not a valuable argument worth pursuing.

I was annoyed by the Berlinski piece, which was pretty obvious gobbledygook, but pleased to see (and read) David Quammen's "Contagious Cancer", about the evolution of transmissible forms of cancer (notably among Tasmanian devils); and Nathanael Johnson's "The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized", about "the raw-milk underground" and the role of bacteria in human digestion (and how some of these bacteria and our digestive systems have evolved to coexist). There's also a variety of other material, some of it interesting, some of it not.

At least Harper's provides some variety; The Atlantic, which we used to subscribe to and which usually had several interesting articles per issue, apparently decided that conservatives in America didn't have enough outlets for their nonsense and took a sharp turn to the right.

Hugh James,

That is possibly the worst argument I have heard all week.

The number of books someone publishes has nothing to do with quality of their ideas. If a concise rebuttal can be expressed in half a page, a book is superfluous. All Berlinski does is engage in polemics - and bad ones, at that.

practically synonyms

HA, HA, ss-stop, you are getting too good at this.

these voices in my head ... Errors also remain.

Well, I do think you point to a problem of sorts, but as the saying goes, plural of anecdotes aren't data. Observation of say delusions is in principle repeatable, uncertainty is quantifiable. But it is still hard, as your argument leads in to, a limitation in knowledge.

Also errors in theories, they have not so much quantifiability. But at least they are temporary. :-P

Yes, I have to break that habit of hitting "Enter", as I do so almost unconsciously.

:-o

Where did you get it? On a typewriter?

Your trackback didn't seem to work. So here's one by hand.

"I wondered where were the responses from the atheist community to Berlinski's book "The Devil's Delusion". I can offer a few..."