
In a podcast If you haven’t read The Devil’s Delusion, a response to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, well, you sure might enjoy it. Meanwhile, from the intro to the pod:
We live in intellectually mediocre times, when commitment to true debate as a means of ascertaining truth — and the understanding that reasonable people can have different opinions — has been replaced by a desire among the culturally powerful to stifle heterodox thought and punish unapproved opinions.
On the Humanize podcast, from Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, Wesley Smith’s guest refuses to yield to such intellectual straightjacketing. A true polymath and a Senior Fellow with the Center for Science & Culture, Dr. David Berlinski advocates heterodox ideas and thought, ranging from questioning Darwinism, to espousing the once-self-evident truth that there is such a thing as human nature. He and Wesley discuss the philosophy of mathematics, the corruption of science, and the causes of the ongoing devolution of Western society. Berlinski is stupefied to learn of the new environmental movement known as “nature rights,” which he rightly brands as “idiotic.” It’s a fascinating conversation with Berlinski, who is rightly considered one of the great minds of our time.
Evolution News, “David Berlinski on Architectural Nihilism, Human Nature and the Holocaust, and Emotivism” at Evolution News and Science Today (March 17, 2022)
Berlinski is thoroughly enjoyable. I look forward to listening to the referenced podcast.
My favorite Berlinski quote I found here in the UD comments a year or two ago where Berlinski describes an imaginary meeting with author Jorge Luis Borges. In this meeting, Borges outlines a belief that all great literature is the result of copyist errors. It is an entertaining reduction of evolution to it’s absurd conclusions.
Pah-leeze……
Blastus
I have posted this in the past, just hilarious
On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote
I imagine this story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.
His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that “the Ulysses,” mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from “the Quixote.”
I raise my eyebrows.
Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer.
“The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden,” he says. “They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo.”
Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.
“As you know,” he continues, “the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576.”
I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.
“Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor’s Los Hombres d’Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza’s remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined.”
I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. “Is it your understanding, then,” I ask, “that every novel in the West was created in this way?”
“Of course,” replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: “Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.”
Vivid
Chuckdarwin at 2, as someone who takes Charles Darwin name as a handle, a man who’s ‘theory’ led to the deaths of a few hundred million people in the 20th century, I don’t think I would be commenting on anyone else’s mental prowess if I were you.
Just a suggestion.
And that is not even counting the untold millions, upon millions, of abortions worldwide.
Verse and quote
A magnificent endorsement.
What better than to have the person who is 100% wrong to suggest something is wrong. This has made me want to listen.
Is this an example where two wrongs make a right?
Human nature? Where was he when a thousand comments were spent discussing it a year ago? Could he have prevented 990 of them?1
David Berlinski is truly a brilliant, and fair minded thinker. Thus, it is hardly surprising to see Chuckdarwin and his ilk take exception to such verity.
Well I hope so. He and I are fellow travelers. But for all of you literalist Christians Bible thumpers out there, he’s not in your camp when it comes to religion. So don’t get all hot and sweaty about him.
–Ram – Very Pro-ID.
P.S. Pro-ID does not mean Pro-Bible-Or-Any-Other-Religion
@Ram #7
I could care less if Berlinski doesn’t identify as someone who’s religious. I’m a fan of Berlinski because he doesn’t blindly accept the status-quo of science. Simply stated, he’s a voice of reason in what’s become a very nonsensical world.
KRock — Pro ID and a work-in-progress Christian
See comment I just posted about this on another thread
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/william-lane-craig-defends-theistic-evolution-at-peaceful-science/#comment-749866