I read Berlinski’s article in COMMENTARY, “The God of
the Gaps”…
(for full text)
http://dakowski.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=494&Itemid=48
…on , ironically, the very night of my Easter– the
most important day of my religion, for it is then that
Jesus is believed by us to have proven that HE indeed
is the Son of God; and so we utter in greeting each
other: “Christ has arisen”; to which we respond: “He
truly has arisen.” Unfortunately, our theologians
could neither get together on the date of Easter,
except once every few years, for our fellow
Christians, nor on the date of Passover for our fellow
Jews. Thus, it is here, in what is the key method of
science, MEASUREMENT, that there is a Biblical flaw in
our faith– MEASUREMENT…the stuff Berlinski’s bank
account is made of.
Berlinski is not only arguing for doubt in Darwinian
evolution, but he is also INSISTING on the certainty
of GOD in man’s image (the true logical sequence, for
we all have seen man but few if any saw God). In doing
so– to this believer– he reads and sounds like an
adolescent sophist on a Baptist high school debating
team (or is it Regents University?) as he bases his
case on snip and cut quotes from defensive and angry
scientists and singles out for his rage fellow
adolescent sophist Christopher [what a nice Christian
name] Hitchens. The latter has been the darling of the
neocons and their ideological “World War IV” in the
Middle East, but I guess not for Berlinski, the man of
God in man’s image ideology…or is he also a neocon?
Alas, at his best, Berlinski only reiterates the need
for philosophical supervision of science….and,
presumably of mathematics, applied or contrived, to
which I say AMEN, bravo! Here, here– yes indeed,
evolution NEEDS very much philosophical supervision–
alas, here Berlinski can quote no contrarians for none
exist among scientists. And most certainly, as a
neurobiologist myself, ALL BRAIN SCIENCE DATA needs
severe philosophical scrutiny. For that God gave us
Gerald Edelman and many, many other older sages of
science who no longer litter the libraries with data
but philosophically extract ideas from that of others.
Yet, I urge Berlinski to heed the caution of
neurophilosopher William Calvin and be weary of the
“janitor’s dream” of fundamentals ridden particle
physicists in the basement trying to conjure up what
goes on in the penthouse of the brain where love, hate
and ejaculation are enrapturing. No, Mr. Berlinski,
nerves do not “twitch,” but they depolarize and
conduct current. And what they do in assemblies we can
barely mathematically model as theory rather than
fact. Right now, evolution of the mind, like the Big
Bang, is all models in search of falsification tests,
much like the theory of eleven universes by a very
attractive Harvard theoretical physicist, Lisa
Randall. She may be a lot cuter than Darwin ever was,
but offers no less a theory in search of falsification
tests. Though science is really the inverse of a
cancer test: you can’t be sure about cancer until a
test comes out positive and about science except when
an experiment comes out negative, these are not
dreamed up, as Berlinski would have us believe in
ignorance. Since all these branches of science are
incomplete works in progress, should we settle for
“God” as a totem blocking their path to adventurous
scientific investigation?
Berlinski’s vague amorphous God cloud substituting for
science is the Old and New Testaments as FACT. That
may be fine for the neocon materialists in their quest
to “re-establish” Israel (meaning: “defier of God”) in
Jerusalem as Zionist kings of the Middle East (what
else could they ask for in their waining years now
that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin– the Three Who Made A
Revolution of their youth are all dead?) but it fails
to define a moral compass for mankind, given that the
Bible makes us all look like nothing but circumcised
apes vs. the uncircumcised apes.
Neurobiology is a young and maturing experimental
science, a term Berlinski failed to consider in his
epiphany against it. Evolution is actually history
helped with clues from genetics, another young
experimental science. Decades from now genetics may be
able to tell us what are the chances that Berlinski
may go mad; but certainly now it cannot tell us if he
is mad…Does that mean we should stop research into
the neurobiology of madness and just leave him to
clergy instead? We tried that for centuries and all we
got were exorcises, Freud and Lewis!
Berlinski’s COMMENTARY article is a fraud because it
slanders as anti-God the very science that makes no
pretensions of knowing anything about God. Yet
Berlinski asserts God’s divine dominion and that we
are made in His image as if he knows best because his
revelation came to him upon eating mushrooms or
something (he gives us no clue).
Berlinski fails– nay, AVOIDS– answering the
question: is there ONTOLOGY without ONTOGENY? No, Mr.
Berlinski, no Amazonian Indian has, as far as I know,
lived a full life in the jungle AND THEN moved on to
Cambridge to write a learned and literate PhD thesis
on civilization from bottom up and from top down. And,
no closer has Berlinski come to a chimp than I to
Jesus, so there’s little he can say with authority–
other than Chomsky’s hypothesis based on “think
experiments”– about the chimp’s non-verbal vs.
Berlinski verbal type cognition. Again, BEING IS
ACQUIRED through a neotony of prolonged maturation–
there is no ontology without ontogeny– not
necessarily a capriciously God given one for the
circumcised but rather one acquired by nature-nurture
interactions developing into intelligence.
I can’t admire Blinks’s faith, given that it is a
payed-per-word assault on Hitch en’s attempts to make
a living selling books. Both come off looking like a
not too interesting boxing match between two blind
fighters. But I do resent the game the noons played
ALLEGEDLY (???) on behalf of Israel, exploiting the
so-called “Christian Zionists” whom the noons laugh at
privately as “dumb gym.” The dumb noons don’t realize
that the domestic agenda of these gos is a Christian–
of their kind only– America that would eventually
deny Blinks and his Nikon fellows citizenship unless
they suddenly find Christ. In my old age I was
planning to be a philosopher too like my beloved
Edeline and Calvin, not to put myself at risk hiding
Jews in my armories from the Hagee-ilk Inquisition.
That’s why I find Berlinski and the neocons and their
World War IV ideology so outrageous– as a scientist,
as a Christian and as an American by choice, not
chance.
I hope Berlinski’s faith in God eventually saves him
from the high probability scourge of Alzheimer’s
better than can our neuroscience to date. As for me, I
still think God would rather I research the damned
disease rather than just pray wishing that He not
inflict it on me but on my pesky neighbor instead.
Daniel E. Teodoru
