If you saw the documentary Expelled, the one that concludes with Richard Dawkins saying he’s 95% certain that intelligent design by a god is impossible but quite open to the idea that extra terrestrials planted biological life on earth, then you might remember an interview with author and mathematician David Berlinski. He lives in Paris and works, if memory serves, in the oldest building there. Though a member of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Berlinksi admits he has a warm but distant affection for intelligent design, the same he displays for his ex-wives in public, as he told Slate.

What he doesn’t have any affection for is shrill Darwinian atheists who attack religion. His new book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, shows the risibility of the new atheists’ (Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins among them) claim to scientifically disprove God. He doesn’t limit his arguments to science, but points out all sorts of bogus assertions. Among the most striking is the idea that evolution is making us kinder and gentler. He quotes psychologist Steven Pinker.

Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to an old superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassinations as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as a major form of conflict resolution–all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

Unfortunately, the 20th and 21st centuries have by far been the bloodiest yet and secularism has proved a better killing machine than any other religion in the history of the world. Berlinski connects the philosophy of secularism with its results: “What Hitler did not believe in, what Stalin did not believe in, what Mao did not believe in, what the SS did not believe in, what the Gestapo did not believe in and what the end NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the 20th century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”