Someone once suggested to me that the true continuing thread in my work as a writer was a certain kind of irritation . Irritation in particular with people who think they’ve got things All Figured Out. Irritation with those savants, self-proclaimed experts, system-makers, ideologists, gurus and other know-it-alls who subsist in the serene certainty that there are no mysteries, not to them and their system, their Theory of Everything. Part of it is a genuine intellectual predisposition to epistemological skepticism, but part of it, I’ll admit, is personal. As someone constantly plagued by doubt, by uncertainty, by frustration with the insolubility of so many of the mysteries of human history, human nature and the nature of the universe, the comfortable, untroubled smugness of those who think they really know what’s what, really annoys me.
I’m thinking of people like the late Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who managed to convince vast numbers of gullible people and institutions that she had Figured Out Death with her bogus “five stages of dying.” I’m thinking of all those self-satisfied New Age philosophers who claim to know the Secrets of Life, conspiracy theorists certain they knew the Real Story Behind Everything. Perhaps that’s what impelled me to spend most of the past decade skeptically examining the theories of those who claimed to have explained Hitler, figured out Evil itself.
“There are more things in Heaven and earth,” Hamlet says, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” but in practice few believe it. Few can live with the idea of inexplicability, few theorists possess the “negative capability” Keats attributed to Shakespeare, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, contradiction, unknowability and the lack of intellectual closure without “irritable reachings” for certainty, without the consolation of belief that all the Big Questions have been settled by Stephen Hawking, Stephen Pinker or someone.
Even professional skeptics, however rigorous, can make skepticism itself into a religion. While I’ve been a faithful reader of publications such as Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic Magazine , whose critiques of New Age quackery, paranormal and spiritualist claims I usually applaud, nonetheless I sometimes find even in these magazines a tone of unwarranted certainty that there is nothing in heaven and earth undreamt of by science, nothing that hasn’t already been explained, a tendency to raise the illusion of scientific omniscience to a credulous faith.
In other words, it’s extremely rare to come upon a genuine skeptic, one whose scientific training doesn’t turn his negative capability into a religion of positivism, if you know what I mean. David Berlinski, however, is that rara avis, a True Skeptic, one of the most provocative-and courageous-of contemporary writers and thinkers. To me, Mr. Berlinski is a genuine intellectual hero. One whose challenge to the certainties of evolutionary biology and Big Bang Cosmology-the comfortable certainties of conventional wisdom about the origin of man and the origin of the universe-does not come from allegiance to rival certainties such as biblical creationism. Instead, Mr. Berlinski turns the methods and assumptions of science on itself to demonstrate the implausibilities underlying the arrogant claims of the grand theorists.
Mr. Berlinski, who has done postdoctoral work in both molecular biology and advanced mathematics, is best known for his beautifully written tribute to the vision of mathematics in A Tour of the Calculus . It’s a book that grows out of a love affair with the power and beauty of calculation, and it is perhaps this passion and devotion that fuels his anger at what he regards as the betrayal of mathematical truths by evolutionary and cosmological theorists. It is this impassioned love affair that has emboldened him to venture into a veritable lion’s den of lionized theorists such as Richard Dawkins (whom Mr. Berlinski took on in a legendary debate at Oxford), and led him to scornfully and scathingly attack such high priests of contemporary cosmology as Stephen Hawking and Alan Guth.
I first encountered Mr. Berlinski’s searching, skeptical vision in a remarkable essay called “The Deniable Darwin” that appeared in the June 1996 issue of Commentary . While even the most sophisticated critiques of Darwinian theory by “creation scientists” operate from the assumption of an Intelligent Designer or Creator, Mr. Berlinski scrupulously stuck to a critique of the neo-Darwinian synthesis that turned its own pretended scientific and mathematical rigor against it, undermining it from within rather than from without. He went beyond the well-known evidentiary problems-the gaps in the fossil record where intermediary creatures between species (as opposed to intra species variations like the beaks of finches and the wing colorations of moths) should be, but are not. He proposed a sophisticated information-theory critique of the Darwinian fundamentalist belief that chance and random mutation, modified by the crude filter of natural selection, could account for the “irreducible complexity” (as Michael Behe, the author of Darwin’s Black Box , puts it) of such conceptually and biochemically complex phenomena as the eye and the immune system.
In “The Deniable Darwin,” Mr. Berlinski exposes just how heavily the arguments of the defenders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis depend on smuggling in arguments from Design to rescue the improbability of their contention that unrelated chance mutational increments alone can add up to constructions so exquisitely calibrated and coordinated as visual and immune-recognition systems.
That argument was followed, three months later, by an extended forum in Commentary ‘s letters pages in which Darwinian defenders took their best shots at Mr. Berlinski in rhetoric that ranged from the outraged to the abusive, and Mr. Berlinski succeeded-in my view-in deftly and definitively trumping them with his replies. It was exhilarating, eye-opening intellectual combat. As was Mr. Berlinski’s more recent critique of cosmology (“Was There a Big Bang?”) in the February 1998 issue of Commentary and the responses to it in the May 1998 issue.
Here, ever more daringly and more unexpectedly (since critiques of Darwinism, albeit heretical, were nonetheless not unfamiliar to me), Mr. Berlinski brought forth some surprising and disturbing testimony that the assumptions of big bang cosmology were more “secular myth” than solid science. He argues that data upon which the belief in a big bang origin of the universe was founded-such as the nature of the background radiation supposedly left behind by the big bang and the “red shift” proposed by Edwin Hubble as evidence for the expansion of the universe-was shaky at best. It’s the math that doesn’t add up, Mr. Berlinski contends. He cites in particular the critique by I.E. Segal, a widely respected mathematician who, Mr. Berlinski writes, “studied the evidence for galactic recessional velocity [the supposed signs of post-big bang expansion] over the course of 20 years with results that are sharply at odds with the predictions of big bang cosmology.”
He quotes Mr. Segal arguing that big bang cosmology “owes its acceptance as physical principle primarily to the uncritical and premature representation of [the red-shift distance relationship] as an empirical fact … Observed discrepancies … have been resolved by a pyramid of exculpatory assumptions which are inherently incapable of noncircular substantiations.”
Mr. Berlinski then goes on to demonstrate the circular reasoning of this substantiation-how certain cosmological atlases of receding galaxies assume the red-shift distancing they supposedly illustrate.
Mr. Berlinski goes further and deeper to question the vast black hole in the groundwork of big bang cosmology, its inability to recognize the philosophical fraud it’s founded upon: the belief that a big bang, an inflationary universe, explains how and why Something can be produced from Nothing. All the double talk about the universe being created by “fluctuations in a vacuum” and “popping into being” from nothingness or from abstract mathematical structures that anticipated Time, Space and Matter, cannot disguise that such formulations give us not a story of origins but of infinite regress, and beg the questions: What created the “fluctuations in a vacuum” that supposedly produce something from nothing, from whence came the mathematical structures and the quantum phenomena that led the universe to “pop into being” from a Nothingness beyond Emptiness?
Under Mr. Berlinski’s sharp eye, the pretensions to sophisticated, advanced science in these concepts reveal themselves as sophistry not much more advanced (and in some ways less so) than the medieval debates about the number of angels that could dance upon the head of a pin. I’ve alluded in a past column [March 2, 1998] to Mr. Berlinski’s deft demolition of the pretensions of Alan Guth’s (he of the “inflationary universe” hypothesis) attempt to refute Lucretius’ ancient dictum that “nothing can be produced from nothing.” In fact, looked at a little more closely, Mr. Guth’s now faddish theory, given lip service by all the popularizing science magazines, is not the story of how something came from nothing, but rather the story of how something as large as the universe came from something as small and compressed as the head of a pin, the pin-sized mass that exploded, inflated in the big bang. Small but still indubitably, undeniably, something rather than nothing.
Again on the letters pages, there were howls of rage at Mr. Berlinski’s skepticism from cosmologists, and again, to my mind, he pulled the rug out from under his critics. Whether you agree or disagree, it was thrilling and thought-provoking, and I’d urge anyone tired of the usual debates about the usual subjects with the usual suspects to take a look at Mr. Berlinski’s pieces and the debates that followed them. Some publisher, like the Library of Contemporary Thought, ought to bring them out as a book.
What if he’s right? Tom Wolfe asked dramatically in a famous essay introducing the theories of Marshall McLuhan to America when they were still novel. In fact, if you ask me, McLuhan’s theories about media are infinitely less consequential than David Berlinski’s challenge to the received wisdom about the origins of man and the universe. The stakes in the question, “What if Berlinski’s right?” are far higher. The stakes are whether we must go back to square one in our understanding of origins, of whether, for all our pretensions to enlightenment and understanding, we’re still, in some profound way, whistling in the dark.
What if he’s right? I decided I wanted to meet David Berlinski in person, because I wanted an answer to that question and to some others about the man who may be the single most important skeptical thinker in America. Someone who puts all the deconstructionist and culture-studies critiques of science to shame because he can actually do the math . Whose critique of science is far more genuinely radical, disturbing and destabilizing than anything those intoxicated by the sophistries of Jacques Derrida could imagine.
I wanted to know from whence came the courage and the contrarian temperament that prompted him to call into question certainties certified by multiple Nobel Prize winners. Just who did he think he was? I wanted to know if, as some of his critics charged, his critique was a cover for a hidden agenda, creationist or otherwise-an answer to replace the answers he questioned, a substitute certainty to replace conventional wisdom with. Or was he a true knight of negative capability?
As it turned out, Mr. Berlinski-a San Francisco resident-was coming to New York to debate his critique of cosmology at a private conclave at the home of George Soros. Through Commentary editor Neal Kozodoy, I arranged to meet with Mr. Berlinski the afternoon following the Soros debate (which was closed to the press). It was an absolutely fascinating encounter, and I’ll explore it in depth next week.
