CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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| Quote (Tony M Nyphot @ Jan. 11 2017,23:09) |
Being fortunate enough not to have seen Expectorated, I found I was remembering this from Panda's Thumb:
David Berlinski interviews self, calls self "crank"
To quote Nick Matzke: | Quote | | "Over on the “ID the Future” blog, they are posting David Berlinski’s interview with himself. Interestingly, Berlinski doesn’t fare well." |
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That interview seems to have been very thoroughly disappeared. The Panda's Thumb article says it was originally on ID the Future but that address 404s. Going to IDtF's home page and searching for various phrases quoted by Nick doesn't find it. The same searches on Google also turn up nothing. I know the thing once existed because I read it when it first came out. It appears to have gone down the memory hole. Heres the bit Nick Matzke saved: | Quote | David Berlinski interviews self, calls self "crank"
By Nick Matzke
March 10, 2006 15:29 MST
Over on the “ID the Future” blog, they are posting David Berlinski’s interview with himself. Interestingly, Berlinski doesn’t fare well:
… Mr. Berlinski, you have frequently been accused of being a crank, someone more generally participating in what has come to be called crank science. I know that …
DB: So?
… Well, is the accusation one that you accept? …
DB: Sure. It’s obviously true in essence, although I prefer to describe myself as an iconoclast, one whom history will vindicate …
… No doubt …
DB: But the point is the same, whatever the terms. But speaking of terms, maybe I spoke too soon. Look, it’s one thing to say that someone like me is a crank. That’s fine because it’s true. It’s quite another thing to talk about crank science.
… Surely crank science is what cranks do? …
DB: Surely. [snip – read the rest and decide for yourself if there is an actual point to all this somewhere.]
This might be an obscure in-joke or something, and Berlinski is actually being incredibly sophisticated and ironic (or just pretentious – take your pick). But with Berlinski, as with antievolutionists generally, parody is often impossible to distinguish from reality. |
Does anybody have a copy squirreled away?
On the other hand, Googling Berlinski interview turned up enough to remind me why Berlinski is such a shit. For instance: | Quote | Here
… With all due respect, Mr. Berlinski, there are times reading what you have written when it seems that you are right down there in the gutter with the best of them. You did, after all, refer to Richard Dawkins as – and I quote – “a remarkably reptilian character” ….
DB: Did I? Well, mine has been an exercise in defensive slumming.
… I see. What really accounts for your hostility to figures such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins? …
DB: In the case of Daniel Dennett, I think contempt might be a better word than hostility, and indifference a better word still. There are, of course, lots more where he came from – P.Z. Myers, for example, or Eugenie Scott, or Jason Rosenhouse. Throw in Steven Weinberg, just to reach an even number ….
… The Nobel Laureate? …
DB: None other.
… But Dawkins …
DB: An interesting case, very louche – fascinating and repellant. Fascinating because like Noam Chomsky he has the strange power effortlessly to command attention. Just possibly both men are descended from a line of simian carnival barkers, great apes who adventitiously found employment at a circus. I really should look at this more closely. Repellent because Dawkins is that depressingly familiar figure – the intellectual fanatic. What is it that he has said? “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)”. Substitute ‘Allah’ for ‘evolution,’ and these words might have been uttered by some fanatical Mullah just itching to get busy with a little head-chopping. If he ever gets tired of Oxford, Dawkins could probably find a home at Finsbury Park.
… You do not, I gather, think much of the kind of atheism Dawkins is concerned to promote …
DB: It’s pretty much the sort of stuff Bertrand Russell used to put out when he needed to knock-off a popular best-seller or dazzle one of his mistresses. You see, my dear, belief in god is no better than belief in a teacup orbiting Mars, whereupon my dear would generally begin loosening her undergarments. The fact is that these kinds of arguments have been known to embarrass a wart hog. This has been tested at zoos, by the way, and the experiments widely reported.
… But why should we take seriously religious beliefs that are lacking in evidence?
DB: We shouldn’t. But asking someone like Richard Dawkins about the evidence for God’s existence is a little like asking a quadruple amputee to run the marathon.
The interesting point is elsewhere. There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time ….
… Come again …
DB: No need to come again: I got to where I was going the first time. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects. |
His arrogance is matched only by his ignorance. Isn't he a mathematician?
That's Jonathan Witt playing straight man, by the way.
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