 It's an honor to have Dr. David Berlinsky with us. How are you, sir? I'm just fine. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you for coming all the way from Paris to our little place. It was endless. It was endless. Okay. Imagine a hundred years ago. Now, that was endless. It was worse. My trip was worse. David Berlinsky, I want to talk today with you, and you're uniquely qualified to do this, about evolution, science, and progressivism. Because there's a link through them. You've written about this and spoken about this many, many times. You received your PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, later a post-doctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. Glad I didn't take any of those courses. Senior fellow in the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture. You've taught philosophy, mathematics, English at Stanford, Rutgers, City University of New York, and in Paris. And you're now the editor of Inference, International Review of Science. Let's get started. You wrote a book about a decade ago that I read about a decade ago. And in doing this program, I started to think about it. And I said, I think it's important that we have this discussion about science, evolution, progressivism. And I want to start where you started. Let me read you one paragraph. I'm a secular Jew, you write. My religious education did not take. I can barely remember a word of Hebrew. I cannot pray. I've spent more years than I care to remember in studying mathematics and writing about the sciences. Yet, as you wrote in the preface of this book, the book that follows is in some sense a defense of religious thought and sentiment. Biblical verses are the least of it. The defense is needed because none has been forthcoming. The discussion has been ceded to men who regard religious belief with frivolous contempt. The books have in recent years poured from every press, and although differing widely in their style, they're identical in their message, because scientific theories are true, religious beliefs must be false. From your book, The Devil's Delusion, Atheism, and its Scientific Pretensions. That is the thesis, that is the foundational point of your book. Can you expand on that? Well, something particular and peculiar seems to have come over American intellectual life, Anglo-American intellectual life, perhaps 20 years ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, the position that was academically tolerated was a kind of cheerful agnosticism with respect to the religious tradition of mankind. It could be with respect to God's existence. Maybe, maybe not, but this isn't an issue that vexes us profoundly as members of the scientific community. That all changed. Now a kind of very, very vociferous and dogmatic atheism has become obligatory in the scientific community. There are exceptions. There are always going to be exceptions. For all I know, some distinguished physicist may be plotting jihad. I have no idea. But by and large, atheism has replaced any kind of tolerant and forebearing agnosticism as the de facto standard in Anglo-American scientific intellectual life. And as a result, the religious tradition that is a very, very long 5,000-year-old tradition has been made into an object of faint derision among sophisticated men and women. Much to the consternation of people who deeply, deeply admire that tradition. And that I think is a change in the diapason of life that we need to pay attention to. It's relatively new. I think it started around 1980, 1985. But it has become an accelerating force in intellectual life. If you are minded to be a serious Christian or an extremely devout and orthodox Jew or even a serious Muslim, better not go into the scientific community and tell your fraternity brothers that that is what you are. Best to keep your mouth closed. And I think that's generally true. It's among the various topics about which it is not a particularly good idea to make broadcast your views. And then you add, following up on your point, no scientific theory touches on the mysteries that the religious tradition addresses. A man asking why his days are short is not disposed to turn to algebraic quantum field theory for the answer. The answers that prominent scientific figures have offered are remarkable in their shallowness. They hypothesize that we are nothing more than cosmic accidents have been widely accepted by the scientific community. And you say, basically science has nothing to say about life and love and death and meaning. Hardly a controversial point, is it? I mean, if I am asking certain kinds of questions, look around you. There's something there. Open your eyes. You're struck by the existence of the universe. Why is that there? You look at the answers forthcoming from the physics community. They can be described in one of two ways. Well, what do you expect? We're here. Therefore, there's something there. Or it's kind of an accident. These are not the kind of answers intelligent men and women are searching for. They correspond to no deep intellectual need. They're frivolous. Physics really has nothing to tell us. For example, about the origins and appearance of the universe. It has a lot of interesting things to say about cosmology, but it's not the same question. The most radical question you can ask is why is there something, anything, rather than what? Nothing. Well, why is there? It's perfectly possible to propose that there could have been nothing whatsoever. I don't mean some pre-existing stuff. I mean nothing. Well, that's not the world we live in. How come? It's a good question. What's your answer? And when you actually look at the physicists or the biologists or the chemists, their answer is, we know how it happened. We open our eyes to there's something. And we can explain the origin of all that by appealing to some pre-existing something. Are you satisfied with that? If not, well, you're not scientifically literate. Lawrence Kraus makes exactly that same argument. Well, the reason that the universe popped into existence was a pre-existing quantum field from which it arose by a probable situation. And they have no real solid idea, do they? None whatsoever. And yet, they continue to push their theories out as if it's science. Well, let's be fair. Wouldn't you do the same thing if you were a leading physicist? I sure would. If I had a theory that deep down I knew it was no good, but there were all sorts of emoluments, richness, awards, prestige associated with it. I would push it for all its worth, too. Is this why we get these arguments about climate change where the same scientists can't tell you? I'm talking about the top physicist's climate change. We've got to go down that ladder all the way into the bottom. And yet, for a lot of us, it's just a mush out there. In other words, you're saying the top physicist. And what I'm saying is, when we take a look at climate change, we have a community that can't tell us the temperature in a week within 10 degrees, but they can tell us the temperature in 100 years within a one degree. And what I'm saying is you're saying these top physicists, isn't it pervasive? Isn't this a pervasive problem throughout science? To a certain extent. Look, look, science is an enormous enterprise. How many guys, how many women, men and women affirm themselves as scientist worldwide today? Do you happen to have the number? It's 7 million. 7 million people are engaged in the scientific enterprise. And of course, you're going to find very repetitive sociological patterns when there is something as important as the environment or climate. You're going to find groups forming, factions splitting off from the initial group, a tremendous amount of propaganda, elaborate approaches to government resources. There's a great deal of money to be had. And it's not coming from the private sector. It's coming from the federal government. When I talk about fundamental questions about the origin of the universe, we're appealing to the very top of the intellectual ladder. When I talk about climate change, we're talking about some competent people, not many, some competent people with moderately conflicting views, both about the origins of climate change. Yes, the world is getting warmer. The nature of climate change, the reliability of the climatic models, the theories that go into them, and prognostications for the future. It's not entirely clear exactly which group has the most overwhelming and persuasive evidence. Well, let's talk about the top, if you think this fellow, at least arguably Darwin. A lot of theories, a lot of arguments, a lot of science, so to speak. What is Darwinianism? What is that? Well, Darwin comes a mid-19th century figure, 1859. He published what is arguably his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. And the question that Darwin asked himself was a question that all of the 19th century biologists were asking. What is the nature of life? What is the origin of individual species? How did life emerge from inorganic matter? And what are the dynamic laws that change one species into another? If there is such a thing as a change of species. Don't forget alchemy promoted a very similar thesis when it said base metals could be transmuted into gold. It was an argument for transmutation of elements. Darwin provided an alchemical explanation for biology. Species could be transformed into other species. Well, how can this come about? We don't see it every day. It comes about because there are small variations within each species. And these variations are seized upon by the mechanism of natural selection, which simply means some survive, some don't survive. Over vast periods of time these small variations accumulate. They converge on a different structure and various different structures in turn converge on a new body plan, a new organism, a new species, a new entry in the vast pharmacopia of life. That's Darwinism. And it's a position which is being increasingly held as a secular doctrine comparable to the book of Genesis. Was he right? I have a lot of doubts. I have a lot of doubts and so do other people. There are many, many places when one looks at Darwinism, when one says, hey look, this just isn't the scientific theory. It's a collection of anecdotes. Why did the giraffe develop such a long neck? Well, he wanted to reach the trees on the top. Well, how come other animals didn't develop the long neck? Well, they didn't want to reach the trees on the top. How come certain kinds of European eels have to swim across the Atlantic in order to mate? Other kinds of eels are perfectly happy fornicating close to home. Well, it worked for one seal, it didn't work for the other. Why aren't women born with tails like cats? Well, women don't seem to need the tails, even though it would make them even more luring than they are. Why don't cats rule the world? Considering they have every reason and every opportunity to do so. Well, their content being our domestic masters. I mean, the anecdotes pile on interminably. And there's no fundamental leading principle. Do you find that most atheists, more prominent atheists embrace Darwinism? Every last one. And why do they do that? Because it's a secular myth. Even atheists need some compelling myth. How we got here, what we're doing here, what our purpose is. How we got here, it was an accident. What are we doing here? We have no idea. What is our purpose? It's replication, fornication and replication. That's about it. But it's a very, very viable myth. People believe it. They act according to it. And it also doesn't tolerate much as you're right. And as people experience it, doesn't tolerate much religion or people of faith. Atheism, Darwinism, they can't really tolerate religion, can they? Not with any degree of enthusiasm. I mean, everyone will say religion is a matter of what you do in the privacy and therefore the confines of your own home. As long as it doesn't come into the academic world and pollute the stream of vigorous science, you can do whatever you want. That is a way of maintaining the fiction of certain kinds of constitutional protections and at the same time upholding the values of the academy, which are frankly anti-religious. There's no question about that. What's the title of Christopher Hitchens book? Religion Poisons Everything. And I look at this and then you look at our Declaration of Independence. Natural rights, natural law, God given, unalienable rights. How can this notion of Darwinism, atheism, really progressivism, which I want to get into with you in a moment, they really don't work with constitutionalism, do they? We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are endowed by their creator. Oh, wait a second. That has nothing to do. It is flatly inconsistent with the Darwinian hypothesis. All men are not endowed by their creator. All men are not brothers. Quite a different scenario is playing out in the biological world. If you want a comparison look to our nearest neighbors, you would never say all chimpanzees are brothers endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Why should we say that about it? But we do. That's the crucial point. We tolerate the inconsistency because we're forced to. We tolerate the inconsistency, but when it comes to actual governance, the inconsistency in many ways isn't even tolerated. What I mean by that is it's a point of propaganda. It's a point of emotion. But there are parties, there are efforts, right, that adopt this notion of progressivism. And the old progressives who take a lot of their arguments from Hegel and Marx, Woodrow Wilson, or all these fellows Dewey, they would attack the Declaration. They would attack the Constitution. They would attack these traditions. This is old stuff. It's time to move along. All that is holy is profane, Marx said. Right. And so in America today, do you think this notion of Darwinianism that you were talking about, this push towards, I would argue, public atheism. In other words, religion out of the public square. We got to clean it off out of the parks. We got to clean it out of the schools. Get rid of it wherever it is. Yeah. Doesn't this undermine the foundational principles of the United States? Probably. Probably. But look, let me put the point to you in a slightly different way. 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 I would suggest 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're 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 and a manifold of biology, human beings on one side, the rest of the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom and the other. These are facts that I think that any untroubled observer, and by untroubled I mean someone who has not previously adhered to any kind of ideology such as Darwinism, would at 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 toward 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 a chimpanzee a question that was possible for the chimpanzee to answer. So these are, I would say, orthogonal to the main axis of ideology. But in public schools today, in colleges and universities today, again, it's broad stroke, even engaging that kind of discussion. Forbidden, playing football. Exactly. And so what we're really talking about is we're supposed to accept, I think Hegel called it the final end, we're supposed to accept the absolute, the only quibbling is how we get there. And so when we have people teaching like that, people pressing that kind of dogmatism, it becomes much more difficult to have the discussion that even we're having right now. It becomes very difficult. We all know that. That's part of the problem that any secular society faces. The minute that the society becomes secular, it needs embrace a certain kind of ideological system which largely replaces religious thought and tradition. Once that ideological system is in place, of course, the natural self-protective mechanism clicks into place and an effort is made to eradicate any form of dissent. Did you expect anything else? Well, I hope so. But, you know, when this country was founded, they did something very unique in the Declaration of Independence. They wrote this down where few other countries ever wrote. What's the date? I agree. About 1776. Then they set up this constitutional construct. 1781 and thereafter. 1787. And why did they do that? In order to preserve the principles in the Declaration of Independence. This raises an interesting point, then, in response to your question. Ask me. Can there ever be a lasting society that embraces anything other than this notion of Darwinianism, which might lead to progressivism, forms of Marxism, or whatever those isms are? So, is Darwinianism and these very political tributaries really, in many respects, lead to forms of tyranny, in my view, in my opinion? Because government replaces essentially faith, replaces all these other traditions and customs, or at least lords of them. Is that inevitable? Yes. It's inevitable. Look, inevitable. I think you're looking at the wrong focal length. Darwinism is a particular kind of scientific doctrine. It's actually anecdotal. It's very far removed from physics or mathematics. And it plays a certain role in 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 pressures being brought on any scientific theory dealing with these profound questions. For example, we know perfectly well the 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're simply unable to make a coherent chemical account. Jim Tour, a very good synthetic chemist at Rice University, has written about this, for instance, the journal that I'm editing. And he says it's time to call for a moratorium on origins of life research. It's not going anywhere. That's one thing. And then, as inevitably happens, Darwinian biologists by calling attention to themselves so very flamboyantly have called in to question the very structure of the theories they're defending because the physicists have said, hey, you know, that's interesting the guy kind of claims you guys are making. It's all nonsense. But we physicists can handle it a lot better. Somebody, for example, I think his first name is Diane Fisher at Stanford, top-notch physicist. And I've seen a preprint of his. He said, well, you know, Darwin is a very, very interesting theory. But it has no quantitative properties. It's not like a theory in physics. And there's 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. And so the physicists are subtly changing the profile. But what I'm trying to get at was it inevitable is that that science, which is applied by the progressives, by the communists, political science, behavioral science, social science and so forth that have their birth out of, among others, Darwinianism. Are they as amenable to rethinking these scientific theories from which they borrow in order to organize man? I don't think so. Marx-Planck said science progresses one funeral at a time. It's true. Certain generations are going to die out. The next generation is going to be very careful about the kinds of claims they're making. Darwinism is a movement, is an ideology, is a position in thought, is a triumphant creation, is like any other movement in thought. It has its ups and its downs. And it's clearly on the point of radical dissolution right now. What's going to replace it? Whether it will evoke the same clamorous contingent of supporters that Darwinism has evoked? I don't know. We'll see. A lot of sinister developments happening. I mean, big data is itself a response of a kind to the absence of theory and biology and psychology. Big data. Yeah. I mean the collection of health records, social media. Tons and tons of data together with artificial intelligence probing the data. If you really don't understand what's going on in psychology and we don't, if you don't understand what's going on in biology, might as well heap together a ton of data and start looking at it. That's a response. That's something different. That was not expected. Hearing what you've talked about in atheism, Darwinism and so forth. And I read your secular joke. Do you reject the idea that there is a supernatural, that there is a God? Or how do you deal with that? Do I reject it personally? Yeah. And how do you deal with it? God forbid. I should reject such a thing. There's a vast difference between being a believer, having a commitment of obeying a certain set of religious prescriptions. A vast difference between that and fundamental rejection. No, I don't reject it. I can't live with it. I admit that. And what does that mean? It means I'm like everyone else. I'm a secular individual. I like to think that I'm better than I am. I like to think that there's certain forms of consciousness, certain imperatives that I respect, which are religious in nature, but I know I'm kidding myself. I'm a secular human being who tries to do, for the most part, pretty much what he feels like doing. Have a good time all the time as a secular model, right? You have a good time all the time? It's hard. Any form of faith is difficult. You get into these debates with atheists. You defend not, in your view, that they're necessarily as a god or a right religion and so forth, but that you don't know. And what you seem to be saying is, the scientists don't know what they don't know. And yet they insist. Not all. I'm talking about certain specific ones. The atheists. And yet they insist that there is no god and religion is bad and so forth and so on. How do you struggle with this? Or do you struggle with this? Look, the struggle begins by making important distinction. I can say, I believe there is no god. That'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 vouchsafed to 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 only to temporize. And I think that is fundamentally the way most people in a secular society think. And yet, you aggressively, from an intellectual point of view, battle the atheists, which is your point, who insist that god does not exist and what you seem to be saying is, look, I don't know. But I can't reject it out of hand and I can't embrace what you're selling as a replacement. No, that's absolutely the way I feel. I do battle with the atheists. That's a wonderfully vivid image. Chiefly, because I think there are windbags. And if they were arguing another position, I do battle with them too. Dawkins, Harris. Yeah, the whole crew of Jerry Coyne, Dawkins, Charlotte, Harris. Christopher Hitchens was different. He was a very sophisticated guy. And he knew that a lot of what he was saying was absurd. I mean, he would get up and say, never believe anything without evidence. And I would say, what about what you just said? What's your evidence for never believe anything without evidence? And he would say, well, it's just a sentence, which is literally what he said. It's just a sentence, something I say. But yeah, I think dogmatic atheism, the movement of atheism is an embarrassment and contemporary thought. And I think I'm pretty much alone in thinking that. It is a very popular or very effervescent movement. Their whole societies consecrated to upholding atheism. And of course, the first thing they do when they gather together in ecumenical devotion is form factions and start hurling anathemas. Oh yeah, there's atheism, atheism plus. And when they finished hurling anathemas, of course, the women discovered that they've been sexually oppressed by the men. They spend endless amounts of time denouncing sexual harassment in the atheist movement. And of course, for somebody like me, that's just a joy to watch. The atheist movement tends to be a movement of the left. Yeah. I don't know many conservatives, so-called conservatives, some are, some are, but most aren't, who are atheists. Why is that? Well, to the extent that Marx offers a substitute for religion, you would not expect a dogmatic or an orthodox communist to say, yeah, the scientific system of society is what Marx has given us as a tool of analysis, but it all is contingent upon the whims of a deity. That doesn't fit very well with communism or with Marxism. It seems an irrelevant postulate. But there are plenty of rotten guys on the conservative side, for example, the Nazis. You don't think of the Nazis in terms of radical atheism. I don't think of them as conservatives, though. Well, they were pretty lousy. Fashions. They were pretty lousy. But so what? I mean, with respect to the Nazis, even if the SS executioners took communion after murdering a lot of elderly Jewish women, who cares? But when we come back, what I'm trying to expose, I think, and you may disagree, is that Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, this whole collective philosophy with their differences and so forth, they have to reject religion. They have to reject traditions. They have to reject customs. Or their philosophies don't make any sense. That's that more broadly when we return. Philosophers, ideologues, their progeny, various intellectuals of the turn of the last century, pushing this agenda of human sciences, they call them, behavioral sciences, political sciences. And they're built on this notion of science. And yet they also embrace, I was saying, you know, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, this sort of thing, who really do insist that you basically have to destroy the existing society in order to get to the promised land for a variety of reasons, materialism or whatever it is. We've heard that before. We've heard that before. The modern incarnation of this, of this attitude, of this belief system, the progressives, the so-called democratic socialists, isn't this where they're dragging countries or maybe not dragging them, where people want to go in these various countries in Europe, in the United States? Sure. Everybody wants to go there, provided they can go there without any personal inconvenience. Me too. I'm not objecting to universal health care in France. It doesn't work. It's the only problem. Yeah, it worked for me. That's all I care about. Exactly, right. And if you have 40 million other people who say exactly the same thing, you will have a system exactly like the socialized system of medicine in France, which I must say did a great job on me. You know, it gave me a new aortic valve. Actually, it may not. Yeah, well, that's not really my problem. And there you've touched on a crucial point. These usual frucks destroy the bonds of solidarity, don't they? You cannot endlessly profit from a state subsidized system and spend a lot of time worrying about your obligations to other people in the same situation. You can spend a lot of time talking about your obligations, but worrying about them, that's quite different. He said, I'm doing well. This guy may not be. I got no complaints. But isn't that the point when you're unmoored from these principles? When you're unmoored from values, belief systems, or faith, wherever one believes they come from, that's what it comes down to. I got what I want. He didn't get it. That's his problem. Aren't societies developing more and more in that direction, unfortunately? Well, secular societies tend to atomize very frequently. They dissolve into individual constituents. And the social sciences, that used to be called methodological individualism. The unit of analysis is always the individual, but the unit of agency is also the individual. And I think that is a feature of a secular society, and it seems to be a feature of secular societies that's deeply desired by the inhabitants of a secular society. One thing we have to understand and accept, however reluctantly, is something like the second law of thermodynamics. Second law of thermodynamics. You got it. What is it? Things go from bad to worse, and they go in only one direction. It's a great law of physics. Is that where we're headed? I'm telling you what the second law of therm... There better be another law. As far as I know, that's it. Things go from bad to worse. Look at us. Yes. It goes in one direction. Young ones, we're getting old now, right? I'm only speaking the truth. Speak truths to power. Right. And the second law of thermodynamics embodies the most ancient part of human wisdom. Things go from bad to worse. How about societies? Them too. Do they ever recover? Do they recover? No, but new societies form. After all, every human birth is an achievement in violating the second law of thermodynamics, isn't it? Every time a flower buds, we have a violation. But it's not all bad. Societies do change very radically, and they generally change in one way. The only problem is what takes place when they change. If it's a violent change, then we have a problem on our hands. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.