From the film Expelled: Dr. David Berlinski (r)

speaks with Ben Stein (center) and Dr. Gerald

Schroeder in front of a remnant of the Berlin Wall.

An Afternoon with Dr. David Berlinski

(Posted June 2, 2008 www.RemnantNewspaper.com) When I went to a local movie theatre to see “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” during its short run, I went with very low expectations, and more out of a sense of duty than anything else. The critics had uniformly savaged this documentary exposé of the academic tyranny of the Darwinian establishment, and even allowing for their liberal bias I had expected to encounter a schlock production along the lines of other such films produced with the backing of evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I realized that the critical savaging of this film was probably motivated primarily by fear—fear that “Expelled” might actually succeed in tearing down what the film, in a thematic allegory, likens to a Berlin Wall in academia, behind which are confined in lonely exile the hardy few who have dared to challenge the teaching of Saint Darwin by stating the obvious: that the emergence of life in all its unimaginable and irreducible complexity can only have been the result of creation according to an intelligent design. With Ben Stein, the lawyer, former presidential speechwriter and Hollywood celebrity as its front man and narrator, “Expelled” is a lavishly mounted and brilliantly executed piece of anti-Darwinian propaganda, in the best sense of the word.

First of all, Stein and his director (Nathan Frankowski) deftly allow the paladins of Darwin in today’s academy to make fools of themselves by putting on display their own comical pomposity, bigotry and lack of credible answers to the most basic questions. One by one, pop culture’s leading lights of Darwinism and scientific atheism, so accustomed to being carried hither and yon on the cushy sedan chair of media adulation, are seen ranting, smugly pontificating, or stumbling and bumbling in Stein’s hot seat. Richard Dawkins of Oxford, Daniel Dennett of Tufts, William Provine of Cornell, an almost self-parodically school marmish Eugenie Scott at the “National Center for Science Education” (a think tank that oversees Darwinian orthodoxy in the public schools), Michael Ruse of Florida State, P. Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota—all of them cooperate handily in making the case against themselves by simply speaking unguardedly to the camera.  The last few minutes of the film are worth the price of admission: Stein makes an absolute ass of Dawkins, the reigning pope of the Church of Darwin, with nothing more than a few simple questions and a well-timed incredulous grin. Without the cover usually provided by a deferential interviewer, the upper hierarchy of the Darwinian establishment comes off as a rather sad and clownish lot.

But there is much more to the film than a demonstration that the “Darwiniacs,” as Joe Sobran calls them, are empty suits who rely on bluster, intimidation, censorship of opposing views, pseudo-scientific razzle-dazzle, and the fawning media to maintain their dominance.  Ben Stein, a Jew, dares to present the evidence,  so abundantly present in the historical record, that Darwin’s theory of natural selection producing man and all other species through “survival of the fittest” inspired the early 20^th century eugenics movement, the medical experiments of Nazi doctors on living human subjects, and ultimately the Holocaust itself.  In a major segment of the film Stein interviews—on the very grounds of Dachau, no less—the author of From Darwin to Hitler, Cal State historian Richard Weikart, and Stein journeys to Darwin’s home, now a veritable shrine, to stare down a marble statue of the great man, as if to ask: “Who are you, and what have you done to this world?”

The film concludes with a tableau of three Jewish intellectuals: Stein (valedictorian of his class at Yale Law School), nuclear physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder (formerly of MIT and now a professor at Hebrew University), and mathematician and philosopher Dr. David Berlinski. The three men are standing next to a remnant of the Berlin Wall, lamenting the tyranny of Darwinism and calling for an academic resistance movement to breach the wall of Darwinian intolerance.

It hardly needs to be explained how stunning a breakthrough this film is, even despite its flaws (including a rather painful-to-watch appeal to Jeffersonian liberalism as the antidote to Darwinism). I paid three times to see “Expelled,” for the sheer pleasure of watching over and over again such an unexpected bombshell of a movie, hardly believing that Stein would have lent his name to the production, since it surely means the end of his Hollywood career.

On each viewing, I was particularly impressed by the segment involving Stein’s interview of Dr. Berlinski, an American expatriate, in his rather splendid Paris apartment. Berlinski seemed to transcend what one would expect from a typically brilliant product of Columbia and Princeton in the 1960s. There was something Catholic about the precision and the respect for categories and distinctions with which he critiqued Darwinian thought—almost as if he had been given a Jesuit formation back when the Jesuits were still Catholic.

Intrigued, I bought a copy of Berlinski's latest book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. I was amazed to read, from this professed agnostic Jew who “cannot pray,” one of the best defenses of religious faith against scientism that has ever been written. George Gilder of National Review rightly calls it “a promethean work” and “the definitive book of the new millennium.”  Confirming my intuition about the catholicity of his thought, Berlinski cites Saint Thomas and the Summa Theologica extensively (praising the “faith and genius” of the Angelic Doctor), depicts Saint Robert Bellarmine's handling of the Galileo affair as an exemplar of the correct relation between faith and reason, and offers this defense of the Church against the feckless accusation that Christianity, not atheism, is the cause of war and suffering in the world:

"Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?  If memory serves, it was not the Vatican."

The book is filled with such delightful gems. Two weeks after reading The Devil’s Delusion I found myself walking up the steps to the same Paris apartment seen in the film, located in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral. There, accompanied by my friends and colleagues Dr. John Rao and Andrew Bellon, I conducted my own interview of Berlinski for The Remnant, the day before the start of the annual 72-mile pilgrimage from that very cathedral to Notre Dame in Chartres. What follows is a partial transcript of my encounter with a man whose conversion to the Faith would be a worthy Rosary intention for every reader of this newspaper. 

Meanwhile, I heartily recommend that Remnant readers rent “Expelled” when it comes out on DVD and buy multiple copies of The Devil’s Delusion for themselves and others (it appears to be available only at amazon.com). As the interview makes clear, people like Stein and Berlinski are saying things, at great cost to themselves, that too many Catholic churchmen no longer dare to say in their craving for respectability in the eyes of the world. This embarrassing truth is just one of the many symptoms of what Paul VI, that supremely tragic figure, all too belatedly decried as “the invasion of the Church by worldly thinking.”

The Interview

Christopher Ferrara (CF): We’re interviewing Dr. David Berlinski in his apartment in Paris on May 9, 2008.  Thank you for having us here.

David Berlinski (DB):  It’s my pleasure.

CF:  And we’re here to talk about your book, first of all, The Devil’s Delusion.

DB:  Nothing I’d rather talk about.

CF:…. So the title, first of all…. How would you explain it?

DB:  The title came to me.  Everybody always says, “Well, you were just reacting to Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.”  In fact, it never occurred to me.  I was reacting to the line from Shakespeare:  “He must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil.” And I thought that was a perfect image for the book: a long spoon dining with the devil. And when I presented The Devil’s Delusion, of course my editor at Crown Forum said: “Well, what does the book mean?” So I said, “Atheism and its scientific pretensions.” I thought that would be a sufficiently lucid explanation of what I was after.  It’s not just atheism.  It’s not just religious belief, but it’s the particular nature of the debate as it’s taking place in the United States, and to a certain extent in Europe right now.  It’s always in the name of science.  It’s being promoted in the name of a very wicked, very orthodox, secular ideology….

Stigmatizing the Opposition to Darwinism

CF: Do you think that these scientific pretensions of atheism have been ramped up recently?

DB:  No question about it.

CF:  What’s going on?

DB: It’s really hard to say.  I think September 11 scared the living daylights out of a lot of people… they saw a specter.  It’s like the famous line from the Communist Manifesto [speaking German] “Specters Haunting Europe.” All of a sudden they said to themselves, there’s a specter haunting the world, Islamic radicalism, and it was very easy to generalize from Islamic radicalism to religious intolerance. The step was easy to take, and it was taken easily.

CF:  So then, the idea is that to question Darwinism is to engage in a sort of dangerous—

DB: —to be an ally of forces that are dark and noxious in the modern world, that is, fundamentalist intolerance, religious fanaticism.

CF: Of course we’re dealing with fundamentalist intolerance on the other side of the equation.

DB:  Of course we are, but the point is, of course, all these animadversions directed toward the Moslem world are based on complete and perfect ignorance of the Moslem world too. And that’s not an impediment to polemics.

CF:  Well, what do you mean by that?

DB: You get somebody like Christopher Hitchens, or Martin Amis for that matter, the novelist, who are extremely eager to offer their own anathemas, vigorous objurgations, that the most radical force for evil in the modern world is Islamic fundamentalism. And you ask them whether they can read a word of Arabic or paid any attention to the literature, which is now extensive and vast—complicated in many respects, extremely interesting—and the answer is no.  We have no idea what these people actually think or write.  Why should we?

CF: So then the tactic would be to conflate with Islamic radicals anybody who stands up to the Darwinian establishment.

DB:  It’s not a tactic, it’s more a strategy.  It works to perfection.

A Jesuit Formation?

CF: Let’s talk about the book…. [W]hat comes off the pages for me is a kind of a rigor and a respect for categories, and the ability to make distinctions, and an insistence upon distinctions which, for a Catholic, would suggest a Jesuit formation….

DB: I’m more than happy to take that as a compliment…  But my own background is so strongly influenced by logic.  I went to Princeton in 1965. I studied with Alonzo Church, the great logician, and then for ten years thereafter I really worked in mathematical logic, not alone, but with friends, and I think that kind of education makes an indelible mark…. And Jesuits say exactly the same thing about their education. Of course they do….

Evolution as Tautology

CF:  Well, applying logic to evolutionary theory, and particularly the mechanism that it holds forth as the explanation for everything, natural selection, where do we encounter a logical problem? Is natural selection a tautology?

DB: You know, nothing is so apt to provoke the indignation of Darwinian biologists as to remark that the centerpiece of their theory is perfectly empty because it is, in fact, a trivial truth: whatever survives, survives. And Darwinian theory does not really get beyond que sera, sera. And there are all sorts of elaborate strategies designed to circumvent that objection, but whenever they’re investigated seriously, they always return to the same point of triviality.  Darwinian biologists simply have nothing much better than what survives, survives. They’ll call it differential reproduction—namely, what survives, survives.  This may be just a fact of life.

It is not necessarily an annihilating point of criticism.  After all, you can go back to Newton’s Principia and say force equals mass times acceleration.  What is force?  Well, it’s mass times acceleration…. But on the other hand, when you look at Newtonian mechanics, there is a wealth of detail, predictions that flow from the theory. The remarkable coverage it offers of phenomena is completely unlike Darwin’s theory, which really has very few predictions.

CF: Can you give some examples of why Darwinism fails as a predictive science? 

DB:  What has it ever told us beyond what survives, survives? We have no independent assessment in any respect—and this is a point of difference in physics—as to what qualities in a living system will establish its survivability.  That is to say, we cannot look at an organism and say: “These are the qualities from a theoretical point of view, a general theoretical point of view, that we would predict would be favored under certain environments.”  There is no mapping from an environment of such-and-such a nature and an organism of such-and-such a nature to a prediction about which organism is possessing which qualitative – forget about quantitative, they’re nowhere near that – will survive and which won’t.  We can’t say that.  All we can do is look at what happens in the evolutionary record, but that’s not scientific.  We could have done that before Darwin.

CF:  Or an attempt to reconstruct history?

DB: You’ve got one eel that has to travel across the Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce and another eel that doesn’t. Can we say in advance, looking at the eels, given the saltwater environment, this is what we will predict?  No, we can’t, we just have to look and see.  There’s nothing wrong with looking and seeing, but, you know, we don’t need a theory for that.

CF: So not only do they say whatever will be, will be, they say whatever was, was.

DB:  Yes, and I have no objection to all of that.

CF: But that’s not science, that’s history—or an attempt to write history.

DB: I don’t think it makes much difference whether we say it’s science or history. It’s certainly interesting, but we haven’t reached any deep level of explanation as we have in physics…. I don’t need a school of biology to tell me that things that have survived, have survived.  I know that.  We’re here.

CF: Is there any aspect of the theory that is legitimately testable?

DB:  No.

CF: OK.

DB: No, there’s no part of it that’s really rigorously tested.

CF:  Do they even claim that there is some—

DB: — Oh sure—

CF: What’s their chief example of a testable application of the theory?

DB:  You mean in terms of—

CF: —I think Miller mentioned that they had deleted a gene in the gene sequence and that within seven generations, the missing gene reappeared.

DB:  Yes, the literature is full of stuff like this where something is observed, and biologists say: “Well, my goodness, by golly, that’s just what Darwin’s theory predicted.”  The fact of the matter is, they never go back and show us, the rest of us, that is, how Darwin’s theory actually predicted it.  That’s the crucial test.  Almost anything can be brought into alignment with Darwin’s theory.  That’s pretty easy. But why did human beings develop an astonishingly large brain over what is a geological blink of the eye? Well, it was advantageous.  How does that follow from Darwin’s theory?  I mean, what are the principles that specify large brains better, small brains, no good?

CF:  And, of course, if you’re dealing with a process of mutation that’s random, how do you account for the conservation of the different mutations required for the ensemble of the new organism?  How does the organism “know” what to conserve?

DB: Don’t forget, it’s not only the process of mutation that’s random. And contrary to what people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins claim, natural selection is also random….  The best that we can do is say, over geological time, that environments change randomly, because we don’t know why environments change. So you have environments that change randomly, natural selection is random, and mutations are random. So, you’ve got what statisticians would call two random variables, and the product of two random variables is again a random variable, which means the entire theory is essentially stochastic [random] in nature…. It is science with a category of chance and accident—all the structures of living systems.

CF:  Which is why it can’t predict anything.

DB:  Which is why it can’t predict anything.