Origin Story, by the historian David Christian, seeks to tell the entire story of mankind, starting with the Big Bang and ending with globalization and climate change. Calling the book “a marvelous explanation of the whole,” and praising it as both instructive and readable, Michael Gerson laments that it “succeeds at everything except its stated purpose.”

Ultimately, [Christian] wants to provide a replacement for traditional origin stories that come from religion. These he finds contradictory and outdated. But human beings are wired to need explanatory stories, revealing, as Christian writes, “This is what you are; this is where you came from.” Without this rooting, people can become victim to a “sense of disorientation, division, and directionlessness.”

In some ways, Origin Story is appropriately humble. Christian’s version of history, he admits, provides no explanation for ultimate beginnings. Why did the universe start in a high state of order (which is a low state of entropy)? Why did the newborn universe—what Georges Lemaitre called the “Cosmic Egg”—have operating rules that allowed for the emergence of form and structure? There is really no telling. Maybe, Christian hints, the questions themselves are meaningless. And we certainly can’t turn to the divine. “Most versions of the modern origin story,” he writes, “no longer accept the idea of a creator god because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god.”

Christian thus repeats the defining mistake of scientism: the unquestioned assumption that all rational knowledge is scientific knowledge. This is anything but humble. It is a kind of epistemological imperialism that excludes knowledge coming from moral and philosophical reasoning, from theological argumentation, and from historical investigation based on reliable witnesses. Not to mention [something like] the knowledge that someone loves us. Christian attempts to increase the certainty of knowledge by limiting it to less consequential things. It makes the Cosmic Egg more like a Fabergé egg—ornate, beautiful and, ultimately, useless.

As to God, the claim that modern science can provide no direct evidence for a being apart from the natural world is tautological. Does Christian expect transcendence to be like a gas that glows blue when heated? . . . If loyalty is really chemistry, and truth is just the wisp of electric current in a three-pound piece of meat, this is not enough to provide a sense of belonging and purpose. It is not even enough to divert a class of students who hear the call of a fall afternoon, and love, and a vast sky full of meaning.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.