The following is from “
The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions,” by
David Berlinksi. A quote from the Amazon.com review of the book says, “A secular Jew, Berlinski nonetheless delivers a biting defense of religious thought…”
‘Faith’ it is said in Hebrews 11:1, ‘is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’…If religious belief places the human heart in the service of an unseen world, the serious sciences have since the great revolution of the seventeenth century done precisely the same thing….
The universe in its largest aspect is the expression of curved space and time. Four fundamental forces hold sway. There are black holes and various infernal singularities. Particles pop out of quantum fields. Elementary particles appear either as bosons or fermions. The fermions are divided into quarks and leptons. Quarks come in six varieties, but they are never seen, confined as they are within hadrons by a force that perversely grows weaker at short distances and stronger at distances that are long. There are six leptons in four varieties. Depending on just how things counted, matter has as its fundamental constituents twenty-four elementary particles, together with a great many fields, symmetries, strange geometrical spaces, and forces that are disconnected at one level of energy and fused at another, as well as at least a dozen different forms of energy, all of them active.
This is not an ontology that puts one in mind of a longshoreman’s view of the material world. It is remarkably baroque, and it is promiscuously catholic.
You can see a 45(ish) minute interview with Berlinski
here.
