David Berlinski: The Devil's Delusion

But the cathedral is not finished. The interiors are crudely appointed. While some windows glow in subtle colors, others have been put in place before they have been stained, and in some parts of the great vault, simple pine boards have been nailed onto window frames still lacking any windows at all.

Although workmen speaking any number of languages may be seen every day on the cathedral’s work site, there is a certain disorganization to their affairs. It is hardly surprising, given the fact that almost every worker belongs to a separate guild. Guild officials have been known to bring work to a halt over the most trivial of circumstances.

When the cathedral was first proposed many long years ago, the great visionaries imagined a single unified and compelling structure, its massive walls embracing a serene volume of space and light, its flanks ascending smoothly upward so that a slender spire emerged naturally to pierce the sky. Sketches of the original cathedral may still be found in the cathedral’s basement, where mice have taken over all the filing cabinets.

The spire has not been built, and in the clear moonlight, the cathedral looks unbalanced, almost as if it were a cripple defiantly waving a stump against the sky. The rumor is current among knowledgeable architects that from the first, the cathedral was constructed from incompatible blueprints.

The towers do not quite match. One is austere and classical. The other ornamented and baroque.

How was this overlooked?

At the very top of the cathedral, where the spire is intended to pierce the sky, but where only a small stub now exists, workmen have put down their tools. They do not know how to proceed. The architects are of little help. They consult their drawings, but the more their drawings occupy their attention, the less they are able to determine what they mean.

The cardinal longs to see the spire finished, thrust into the sky gleaming, so that he can step back and see it soar.

But the spire presents any number of difficult problems. Some of them are financial. Like every cathedral, this one is supported by public funds. Very often, the cardinal finds himself pleading for money before various church groups. It is a role he finds distasteful. Who would not?

There is dissension among the architects. Some now argue for a spire that is taller than the one planned; others for one that is shorter. And some believe that it should remain an idea, one that all men can see, without ever being translated into stone.

Catching himself in these visions of grandeur, the cardinal reminds himself that cathedrals have been known to collapse, and in thinking of the weight of the faith he has invested in the cathedral, he wonders—it is only natural—whether any structure can support such weight.

Although a visionary, the cardinal is also a practical man. He believes in costs and is apprehensive about expenses. A design should really be tested by experiment. The architects have said so. But the spire is projected to weigh tons and cost millions.

How could it be tested?

And if it could be tested, by what means could the test be tested?

What a question, the cardinal reflects. How can faith be tested? What is its test?

To discontinue work on the cathedral is unthinkable, the cardinal reflects, but even he does not know whether the spire will ever be built. No one is sure. It is possible that the cathedral will forever remain incomplete.

Every now and then careless tourists with no sense of its weight in history dismiss the cathedral as so much antique stone. What is its point? They snap pictures, and they are gone.

How little they understand.

But does the cathedral have a point?

Standing before the cathedral to which he has devoted his life, the cardinal says at least this to himself: that it has given meaning to those who have worked on it, and satisfaction to those who worship in its dim interior.

No one could bear its loss. It has become a monument, and when from the plaza the professional beggars and sly tradesmen and rouge-lipped prostitutes look up, they see that great looming familiar thing, as natural as the space that contains it and the space that it contains.

From time to time, the cardinal allows himself to be questioned by the faithful. He is courteous, polite, and reserved. But he is distant.

“Your Eminence,” they ask in every language of the world, “does our cathedral support the faith by which it is supported?”

The cardinal smiles enigmatically, a sly, ironic, distant, tender smile. Standing there on the cathedral’s steps, he pauses to reflect, the light glinting from his miter, and his hooded eyes troubled.

He does not answer, but if he did, this is what he would say:

Does any cathedral?

Iam grateful to Ann Coulter for having brought the idea for this book to the attention of Crown Forum.

And I am grateful to my editor, Jed Donahue, and my agent, Susan Ginsburg, for the careful reading they gave the manuscript.

Many of the ideas that I present in this book were first expressed in essays that I have written for Commentary over the past ten years. I am deeply indebted to Neal Kozodoy for affording me the hospitality of his journal, and for his own incisive and very often skeptical reaction to what I wrote.

It is a special pleasure to record my indebtedness to the Discovery Institute for loyal support over many years. That the institute has been vilified by all the right people is a special sort of satisfaction.

DAVID BERLINSKI has a Ph.D. from Princeton University and has taught mathematics and philosophy at universities in the United States and France. He is the bestselling author of such books as A Tour of the Calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm, and Newton’s Gift. A senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and a former fellow at the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Berlinski writes frequently for Commentary, among other journals. He lives in Paris.

Copyright © 2008 by David Berlinski

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN FORUM with Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Berlinski, David, 1942–

The Devil’s delusion: atheism and its scientific pretensions/David Berlinski.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Science and religion. 2. Atheism. I. Title.

BL240.3.B46 2008

215—dc22 2007048071

eISBN: 978-0-307-40987-4

v1.0