Rick Richman, editor of Jewish Current Issues, has an article in American Thinker about Neo-Atheism and the response to it from three different authors, including CSC senior fellow David Berlinski.

In April, David Berlinski, a secular Jew and well-known skeptic of Darwinism, who holds a Ph. D. in Philosophy from Princeton and has written widely on mathematics and science, published "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions." The book defends religion by attacking atheism's attempt to enlist science in its cause.

The book is written with Mr. Berlinski's characteristic literary verve. To a Nobel Prize scientist's argument -- offered at a conference on "science, religion and reason" -- that "for good people to do evil things, [it] takes religion," Berlinski responds: "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 ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?"

"If memory serves," he writes, "it was not the Vatican."

It is ironic that what ultimately makes neo-atheism not only unconvincing but off-putting is the fact that it often exhibits the very fundamentalism it purports to find in religion: an absolute certainty in its views, an uncritical worship of its god -- science -- as a saving force, and a denigration of those who refuse to be saved. Berlinski, Novak and Wolpe, in their divergent ways, demonstrate that a religious outlook that does not deny doubt, values humility, and appreciates the implications of the miracle of our existence, is the more reasonable approach to life.