I have always been rather proud of my post comparing Richard Dawkins’ and David Berlinski’s respective views of the other. It remains one of the highest rated posts in terms of views and comments on this blog.
However, the greatest compliment that anyone could have paid me came a couple of years ago when I noticed that it had been linked on a discussion thread of “What evolution cannot explain”. The user “lexiluvr” posted a series of videos from the ‘Tube featuring Berlinski questioning evolution, to which another user countered by kindly posting my piece on what a pseudo-intellectual and a hack Berlinski really is: “Richard Dawkins, a scientist who (unlike Berlinski, it seems) has submitted writings to peer-reviewed journals, discusses Berlinski”.
Compliment enough to be cited as an authority in anyone’s discussion. But the subsequent reply by “lexiluvr” well and truly took the biscuit:
I read that article but I fail to see the relevancy of it regarding the current topic being discussed. It looks and reads like a blog post from a drug addled intellectual.
Intellectual…?
Drug addled?!
Well, only one of those statements is true, but I won’t give away which one… 😉
Tags: David Berlinski, Evolution, expelled: no intelligence allowed, Intelligent Design, richard dawkins, The Devil’s Delusion, the god delusion
manicstreetpreacher 
03/09/2013 at 01:28 |
I absolutely hate Berlinski. The guy is a pseudo-intellectual, smug, douchey hack!
In the 1997 Firing Line debate he was terrible. At one point he told Eugenie Scott that the fossil record isn’t nearly as complete as it should be to meet Darwin’s predictions. Scott pointed out that he used an article from the late 1960s to back this up and that got a good laugh.
He attempted to redeem himself by saying that the fossil evidence on insects is weak. The. Insect. Fossil. Record. Is. Incomplete. He was serious about this, and Scott STILL disagreed and proved him wrong, to which he immediately argued that we got no fossil transitions for spiders…they aren’t even insects, Berlinski you con-artist!
Okay, this comment just turned into a rant. I stand by it.
03/09/2013 at 08:56 |
Rant away, Joe! That’s what blogs are for. Think if we were under contract with a book publisher, we would have to contain true thoughts on certain people…
As I said on my review of Berlinski’s debate with Hitchens, and as per Dawkins’ original assessment of him, I seriously doubt whether he truly believes in Intelligent Design but is simply taking a controversial position for its own sake.
MSP