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Ben Shapiro: US commentator clashes with BBC's Andrew Neil - BBC News

He has more than 2 million followers on Twitter, 600000 YouTube subscribers and his videos on the Daily Wire channel rack up millions of views. Ben Shapiro is ...

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Stop the Censorship. Support The Daily Wire.

Stop the Censorship. Support The Daily Wire: https://utm.io/ugAl YouTube just demonetized Steven Crowder for harming the broader community. Where will this ...

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Michael Aeschliman in National Review — David Berlinski Detonates “Fatuous, Flattering” Optimism

From climate change to the coronavirus, one tendency among writers and commentators is to an urgent, insatiable, almost sexual desire to cast unwarranted terror over other people. This tendency is matched by an equal appetite, among a large part of the public, for being terrified. The market is well matched with its suppliers.

But this dynamic is mirrored by its opposite: a wish, proceeding from different personal imperatives but no less urgent, to assure us that the future looks better and better, all progress with little pain. There’s a market for this, too, and the relationship with the suppliers is just as tight. It’s to this second pairing that David Berlinski turns his attention in his recent essay collection, Human Nature.

Two Celebrity Intellectuals

Dr. Berlinski gets a fabulous review from Michael Aeschliman in National Review, highlighting the “fatuous, flattering” supply chain for empty optimism, exemplified by two celebrity intellectuals. From “An Eloquent Witness and Wit: David Berlinski on Human Nature”:

Berlinski’s targets, and his candidates for the most fatuous, flattering optimists of our time, are two best-selling contemporary intellectuals — Harvard’s Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature (though of course Pinker doesn’t believe in angels), and the Israeli historian Yuval Harari, in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (though of course Harari doesn’t believe in the Incarnation). Pinker alleges confidently that “we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” One should not underestimate the jolly, eupeptic effects of a tenured professorship at an Ivy League university on the point of view of a thinker. In Harari’s very speculative Homo Deus, the futurist tells us that “during the second half of the twentieth century, the Law of the Jungle has finally been broken, if not rescinded” (this from a resident of the contemporary Middle East). He also observes that free will and consciousness do not exist, before going on to tell us that in the future men will be gods. After carefully and wisely critiquing these claims, Berlinski concludes: “Men are not about to become like gods. Harari has been misinformed.”

Berlinski — The Antidote

In response to Pinker and Harrari, the antidote is a sober, rational, humane, historically informed perspective, “sage and saving.” As Aeschliman recognizes, that’s just what the polymathic Berlinski brings to bear:

His wit, as well as his specialized expertise (philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, biology), are centripetally engaged on behalf of the rational human being. As much as Swift, he is a metaphysical dualist, knowing that ethics can neither be derived from nor reduced to scientific empiricism, although empiricism is also an indispensable component of our knowledge and education.

Berlinski’s essays on the First World War and on recent history generally are earnest, antiseptic efforts to stimulate the reader’s rational-ethical sensibility, to illuminate the reality of human inadequacy, incompetence, and tragedy in history — especially recent human history. They remind one of the sage and saving perspectives of earlier, 20th-century thinkers such as T. S. Eliot, Reinhold Niebuhr, Herbert Butterfield, Martin Luther King, Malcolm Muggeridge, and the heroic Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Not bad company to keep! The rational, the sober, the heroic, but don’t forget the hilarious — that is our friend and colleague David Berlinski in brief. Get your copy of Human Nature now.

Photo at the top: David Berlinski on Ben Shapiro’s Sunday Special. Did you miss that? See it here:

The post Michael Aeschliman in <i>National Review</i> — David Berlinski Detonates “Fatuous, Flattering” Optimism appeared first on Evolution News.

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#1 of Our Top Stories of 2019: Informed by Discovery Authors, Yale’s David Gelernter Rejects Darwinism

Editor’s note: The staff of Evolution News wish you a Happy New Year! We are counting down our top ten stories of 2019. If you haven’t done so yet, please take a moment now to contribute to our work in bringing you news and analysis about evolution, intelligent design, and more every day of the year. There is no other voice, no other source of information, like ours. Thank you for your friendship and your support!

The following article was originally published here on October 21, 2019.

This is important. Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter is a polymath, a brilliant writer, artist, and thinker. Famed both for his specific scientific expertise, and for his cultural, political, and historical reflections, he’s also now a confessed Darwin skeptic. More than a skeptic really. 

In a wonderful essay in the new issue of The Claremont Review of Books, “Giving Up Darwin,” he credits reading Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt as the primary cause of his rejecting neo-Darwinian evolution, a “brilliant and beautiful scientific theory” but one that’s now been overtaken by science.

An Intellectual Landmark

He calls Darwin’s Doubt “one of the most important books in a generation,” a “landmark in the intellectual history of Darwinism,” and says that, “Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact.” Well, “open-minded” is the key qualifier, isn’t it?

Dr. Gelernter is not on board with intelligent design:

Meyer doesn’t only demolish Darwin; he defends a replacement theory, intelligent design (I.D.). Although I can’t accept intelligent design as Meyer presents it, he does show that it is a plain case of the emperor’s new clothes: it says aloud what anyone who ponders biology must think, at some point, while sifting possible answers to hard questions. Intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way. It does underline an obvious but important truth: Darwin’s mission was exactly to explain the flagrant appearance of design in nature.

The Deciding Factor

While Gelernter is a religiously observant Jew, he makes clear that, despite what the critics so often say, neither for him nor for Meyer is religion the deciding factor. Science is:

The religion is all on the other side. Meyer and other proponents of I.D. are the dispassionate intellectuals making orderly scientific arguments. Some I.D.-haters have shown themselves willing to use any argument — fair or not, true or not, ad hominem or not — to keep this dangerous idea locked in a box forever. They remind us of the extent to which Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.

It’s worldview commitments that drive loyalty to Darwinism, along with considerations of career and personal prestige, joined with herd thinking and sheer complacency.

What Now for Biology?

I’ll have more to say about this remarkable testament to independent thinking. But as for biology, now what? “Darwin’s intellectual daring will always be inspiring. The man will always be admired.” I have no doubt about that. But:

How cleanly and quickly can the field get over Darwin, and move on? — with due allowance for every Darwinist’s having to study all the evidence for himself? There is one of most important questions facing science in the 21st century.

This long, thoughtful, and beautifully written article reflects David Gelernter’s own willingness to “study all the evidence for himself.” He cites the work of our colleagues Douglas Axe, David Berlinski, and Paul Nelson by name. He notes that two books I collected for Discovery Institute Press, Berlinski’s The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays and Debating Darwin’s Doubt, he also found to be “essential.” Wow.

A lot of writers, a lot of scientists, less gifted than Professor Gelernter refuse to think through these issues for themselves. We’re familiar with the results. Others take the plunge: Tom Wolfe, Thomas Nagel, Dennis Prager, and Ben Shapiro are four quite different but all fiercely independent voices who startled friends and enemies by studying the matter and coming out as Darwin critics. All had their brush with Stephen Meyer’s work, including Darwin’s Doubt and Signature in the Cell.

Just the Past Few Months

We are watching as one support after another peels away from the intellectual “consensus” supporting evolutionary theory. We’ve seen this in just the past few months: Three Nobel Prize-winning scientists endorse chemist Marcos Eberlin’s case for intelligent design, argued in his brand new book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. Well over a thousand PhD scientists declare themselves publicly as evolution skeptics. Modern ID theory’s founding scientist, biochemist Michael Behe, engages in an extended written debate with one of the world’s most distinguished evolutionary researchers, National Academy of Sciences member Richard Lenski, over Behe’s new book Darwin Devolves — and wins (as any fair observer would agree from the record of exchanges between Behe and his critics).

Scientists, intellectuals, and ordinary thoughtful adults are giving up the old pledge of allegiance to Darwin. The evolution in thought is very gradual, admittedly, but it’s unmistakably happening.

Photo: Fireworks of the Space Needle, Seattle, by Wonderlane, via Flickr (cropped).

The post #1 of Our Top Stories of 2019: Informed by Discovery Authors, Yale’s David Gelernter Rejects Darwinism appeared first on Evolution News.

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