36 Quotes by David Berlinski

Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

Of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to gluttony. Once engaged, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself.

But of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to the general proscription against gluttony, and once engaged, even if engaged initially in the service of religion, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly, until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself.

As its campfires glow against the dark, every culture tells stories to itself about how the gods lit up the morning sky and set the wheel of being into motion. The great scientific culture of the West – our culture – is no exception. The calculus is the story this world first told itself as it became the modern world.

The advent of militant atheism marks a reaction – a lurid but natural reaction – to the violence of the Islamic world.

In his introduction to Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, T. E. Lawrence attempted to describe the character of the desert Arabs that both he and Doughty had admired. “They are the least morbid of peoples,” Lawrence wrote, “who take the gift of life unquestioningly, as an axiom.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles, military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The lame and the blind excepted, who could object?

No scientific theory touches on the mysteries that the religious tradition addresses. A man asking why his days are short and full of suffering is not disposed to turn to algebraic quantum field theory for the answer. The answers that prominent scientific figures have offered are remarkable in their shallowness.