David Berlinski on The New Atheism

I just couldn’t resist posting a couple of short selections from David Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

Quoting Sam Harris on the irrationality of religious belief:

“It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half of your people delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.”

Berlinski, a secular, agnostic Jew replies:

“On the other hand, I suppose that Harris might speculate on what is equally an interesting matter of evidence, a concept that he values in the abstract and on every occasion ignores in the particular. The Jewish people yet live, and even in Eastern Europe—even in Poland—they have returned to their ancestral homes; but the thousand-year Reich, that lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens, or ground under Russian tank treads, or destroyed by American artillery, or left to wander in its exiled millions across all the violated borders of Central Europe. And if God did not protect his chosen people precisely as Harris might have wished, He did, in an access of his old accustomed vigor, smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.” (Berlinksi, 30-31)