No Other Good At All

Fearsome Clown 

David Berlinski writes about the arrogance of the modern secular scientist--at least those who hold to its religious form of atheistic scientism.

Curiously enough, for all that science may be a very good thing, members of the scientific community are often dismayed to discover that, like policemen, they are not better loved.  Indeed, they are widely considered self-righteous, vain, politically immature and arrogant.  This last is considered a special injustice.

"Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain, " the biologist Massimo Pigliucci has written, science is "a much more humble enterprise than any religion or other ideology."  Yet despite the outstanding humility of the scientific community, anti-intellectuals persist in their sullen suspicions. Scientists are hardly helped when one of their own champions immerses himself in the emollient of his own enthusiasm.
 Thus Richard Dawkins recounts the story of his professor of zoology at Oxford, a man who had "for years . . . passionately believed that the Golgi apparatus was not real."  On hearing a lecture by a visiting American that his views were in error, "he strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand, and said--with passion--'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you.  I have been wrong these fifteen years.' "  The story, Dawkins avows, still has the power to "bring a lump to my throat".

It could not have been a very considerable lump.  No similar story has ever been recounted about Richard Dawkins.  Quite the contrary.  He is as responsive to criticism as a black hole in space.  "It is absolutely safe to say," he has remarked, "that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane."

The tone is characteristic.  Peter Atkins is a professor of physical chemistry at Oxford University, and he, too, is ardent in his atheism.  In the course of any essay denouncing not only theology but poetry and philosophy as well, he observes favourably of himself that scientists "are at the summit of knowledge, beacons of rationality, and intellectually honest."  It goes without saying, Atkins adds, that "there is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence."  Science is, after all, "the apotheosis of the intellect that the consummation of the Renaissance."

Those comical declarations may be abbreviated by observing that Atkins is persuaded that not only is science a very good thing, but no other thing is good at all.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 6f.]

As Lizzie Bennett once quipped in another context, the modern atheistic scientist is a fearsome creature to behold.  We could also add that he or she is one of the most self-deluded humans on the planet.