A critic of the theory of evolution, Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a Seattle-based think tank that is a hub of the intelligent design movement. Berlinski shares the movement's disbelief in the evidence for evolution, but does not openly avow intelligent design
and describes his relationship with the idea as: "warm but distant.
It's the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives."[1]
Berlinski is a scathing critic of evolution, yet, "Unlike his
colleagues at the Discovery Institute,...[he] refuses to theorize about
the origin of life."[1] Berlinski appeared in the 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein that
"Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one."[10] He also says:
It'd be nice to see the scientific
establishment lose some of its prestige and power...Above all, it'd be
nice to have a real spirit of self-criticism penetrating the sciences.[10]
In his 1996 article, The Deniable Darwin, published in Commentary, Berlinski says he is skeptical of evolution for a number of reasons, claiming:
An appearance "at once" of an astonishing number of novel biological structures in the Cambrian explosion
[11] The article was described by science historian Ronald L. Numbers as "a version of ID theory".
Views on religion
Berlinski describes himself as a secular Jew.[12] Berlinski's views towards criticism of religious belief can be found in his book The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2008).[12]
In summary, he asserts that some skeptical arguments against religious
belief based on scientific evidence misrepresent what the science is
actually saying, that an objective morality requires a religious
foundation, that mathematical theories attempting to bring together quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity amount to pseudoscience because of their lack of empirical verifiability, and he expresses doubt towards Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Many see the rabid
believer in evolution as being part of a group of religionists which has
the god of science as their reference for life.
[We believe that since the Jewish people have undergone many atrocities against them and unintelligent criticism of the Jewish state that this news article needs to be preserved so that people can understand what undying hatred there is on the part of many who without thinking are actually agreeing with Adolf Hitler's policies attempting to exterminate the Jewish race and the state of Israel even now! On the contrary, Israel has more accomplishments toward helping others than any other country large or small, a strange neglect on the part of the supposedly-intelligent most of whom have NEVER set foot in Israel! The editor has been there twice and knows that Robert Fulford is writing the truth and informing us of the stupidity of this collusion between postal workers in Canada who we pay, with Palestinian postal workers. Sad that there is such ignorance in high places!
This form of negativism was how Hitler started raising his nazi forces to hate Jews. Now it is not just coming from from brutal people but from Unions which we allow and students who are in many cases funded by OUR TAX-PAYER DOLLARS!
- Editor]
Robert Fulford: Canada's postal workers jump on the Israel-bashing bandwagon
From the Irish senate and Britain's Labour Party
to university students, just about everyone feels entitled to throw
rhetorical rocks at the Jewish state
A man participates in a "wear a kippah" gathering in Berlin, Germany, to protest anti-Semitism, on April 25, 2018.Carsten Koall/Getty Images
The Irish senate recently passed a bill forbidding the purchase of
goods produced in the West Bank of Israel. Readers with a fairly
sophisticated sense of the Middle East were baffled by seeing Israel’s
and Ireland’s politics linked in the same sentence but they shouldn’t
have been. Just about everyone from everywhere now feels entitled to
throw rhetorical rocks at Israel, even if they have never seen the
place, learned its history or listened to a few of its arguments. Readers
who know a little about Israel are nevertheless aware that it has many
enemies. Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic opinions (sometimes they are
identical) appear regularly in a deafening barrage of criticism focused
on the Jewish state.
Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic opinions (sometimes they are identical) appear regularly in a deafening barrage of criticism
The denunciation comes from all the usual
suspects, including the congenitally bigoted. But they also emerge
nowadays from truly unexpected sources. Last week the three largest
Jewish newspapers in England united to run the same front-page
editorial, heralding what they call a clear and present danger to Jewish
life — the leader of the Labour Party, and possibly the next prime
minister of Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, “a man who has a problem seeing that
hateful rhetoric aimed at Israel can easily step into anti-Semitism.”
People protest anti-Semitism outside the head office of the British Labour Party in London on April 8, 2018.Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty ImagesA horrified article in Britain’s left-wing New Statesman
magazine sees the same themes emerging on the left in “the fervent
loathing of Israel.” There are people, they write, who disingenuously
describe themselves as “critics” but in fact “seek themselves, or side
with those who seek, Israel’s dissolution or destruction.” The New
Statesmen notes that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, yet “the
rhetoric and premise of the two things, by which Jews and Jewish
institutions are singled out as uniquely malevolent and dangerous, are
so frequently indistinguishable as to make the distinction vanish.”It’s
impossible to be neutral about Israel. When foreigners make innocent,
apparently non-political donations to the Palestinians, they may find
themselves caught up in a tragic propaganda war. Belgium, in its foreign
aid, funded a public school for Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority
later decided it should be named Martyr Dalal Mughrabi Elementary
School, to honour the woman who allegedly led the 1978 bus hijacking
that killed 37 Israelis, 12 of them children. Belgium protested against
its gift being connected to terrorism, but the martyr’s name still
stands on the front of the building. Palestinian Media Watch, which
studies the area from outside, reports 31 Palestinian Authority schools
are now named after terrorists.
Protesters demonstrate in London’s Parliament Square against anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party on March 26, 2018.Union members, in Canada and elsewhere, must pay attention
lest they, too, are swept into Israeli politics — and on the wrong side.
The 50,000-member Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) has
acknowledged that it’s joined with the Palestinian Postal Service
Workers Union to “build greater solidarity between our two unions.” When
told about this arrangement, Alon Katzakevich, an Israeli-Canadian
member of CUPW who lives in Winnipeg, said he was “shocked and
concerned.”
The Palestinian union supports the total annihilation of the
Jewish State, rather than a two-state solution.But in the army
of Israel opponents, the most reliable, the smuggest and the most
pestilential are university students. North American students pour out
endless bulletins declaring that Israel must be Boycotted, Divested, and
Sanctioned (BDS). They sponsor the insulting Israel Apartheid Week
every year, they invite on-the-road Palestinian press agents to exchange
praise with them, and they create anti-Semitic environments that affect
at least a few students attending university.
There’s no evidence that
all this activity rattles Israel’s economy or its status in the world,
but for the organizing students it must be satisfying and at least gives
them an international credit to put on their CVs.
In the army of Israel opponents, the most reliable, the smuggest and the most pestilential are university students
The flat uniformity of all these Israel critics
must dismay their teachers. After all, people go to university to
develop their own ideas, not to march in procession. Their activities
raise another question: Why should Israel, and only Israel, be blessed
by this ocean of free advice from academe? As one Jewish commentator
wrote this summer, “Israel is the only nation universally demonized,
delegitimized, and held to a double standard on campuses.” Why only one? Shouldn’t students be upset about North Korea, Syria, Iran, Russia and Yemen? And what about Tibet? • Email: robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
