Quotes from David Berlinski

A function indicates a relationship in prospect, and so belongs to a family of concepts. Relationship, as in related; relationship, as in connected, corresponding to or caused by, united or bound together; relationship, as in linked or yoked, coupled or conjoined, associated or allied. Relationship, as in dependent, indeed, relationship, as in function of, at which point the moving conceptual point may be seen revolving around the perimeter of a circle.

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.

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.

For anyone wishing to argue that once things were worse than they are now, the Middle Ages are ideal. It is widely supposed that having gotten out of them was one of the accomplishments of modern civilization. No contemporary scholar, one might think, would make such a mistake in judgment. A one-man multitude, Pinker champions the case to the contrary. "The people of the middle ages were, in a word, gross."31

In time freed from public fornication, the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were occupied in killing one another in tavern brawls or over tavern wenches; at the dinner table, lacking access to the fork, they used their knives to settle slights as well as scores.33

The image of the fundamental laws of physics zestfully wrestling with the void to bring the universe into being is one that suggests very little improvement over the accounts given by the ancient Norse in which the world is revealed to be balanced on the back of a gigantic ox.

The rational alternative to Darwin's theory is intelligent uncertainty.

There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience

But an innocent conviction of grace, once lost, cannot easily be regained.

Orosius was a disciple of Saint Augustine. It was the purpose of the seven books to provide a defense of Christianity against the common pagan charge that Christianity accelerated, if it did not cause, the decline of the Roman Empire. Orosius met this dubious challenge by reversing its polarity. If things were in the fifth century bad, he argued, once they were worse.

A caricature of this result," Butterfield adds, "is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority—a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion."14

Like Darwin's theory of evolution, Big Bang cosmology has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory is promoted to a secular myth. The two theories serve as points of certainty in an intellectual culture that is otherwise disposed to give the benefit of the doubt to doubt itself.

The speckled moth changes its wing coloring; bacteria develop drug resistance. Why should this count in favor of the thesis that whales are derived from ungulates, or men from fish?

Proponents of strong AI, such as Marvin Minsky, have long thought that consciousness could exist on a silicon platform. Like Ray Kurzweil, he may well be encouraged to download his consciousness to a computer chip no larger than the head of a pin—a perfect fit, as his phrenologist would say.

If a violent act is violent only in virtue of some antecedent violent intention, it is equally true that an intention to do violence is revealed only when someone acts violently.

Were textbooks to disappear tomorrow, and with them the treasures that they contain, it would take centuries to rediscover the calculus, but only days to recover our debts, and with our debts, the numbers that express them.

It would seem that on hearing Abélard's lecture, Anselm of Laon became "wildly jealous," circumstances that Abélard assigned to every conceivable cause except the one that he had set in motion. "Since the beginning of the human race," Abélard observed with some asperity in his autobiography, Historia Calamitatum (A History of My Misfortunes), women have "brought the noblest men to ruin.

However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.

The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.

"Young men wish always to dream of what they have lost." "And old men?" "Of what they have not found."

No man is obliged to be what he might have been.

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.

Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.

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.