David Berlinski was born in the United States in 1942 to German-born Jewish refugees who had immigrated to New York City after escaping from France as the Vichy government was collaborating with the Germans. His father was Herman Berlinski, the noted American composer, organist, pianist, musicologist and choir conductor, and his mother was Sina Berlinski (née Goldfein), an American pianist, piano teacher and voice coach. Both were born and raised in Leipzig where they studied at the Conservatory, before fleeing to Paris where they were married and undertook further studies. German was David Berlinski's first spoken language. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.Berlinksi, David, The Well-tempered Wittgenstein, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1968,

According to his Discovery Institute biography, he was a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University, and was a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France. He has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York, the University of Washington, the University of Puget Sound, San Jose State University, the University of Santa Clara, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, and taught mathematics at the Université de Paris. He currently lives in Paris.

He has written works on systems analysis, the history of differential topology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. Berlinski is known for his books on mathematics and the history of mathematics written for the general public. These include A Tour of the Calculus (1997) on calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm (2000) on algorithms, Newton's Gift (2000) on Isaac Newton, and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005). Another book, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (2003), compares astrological and evolutionary accounts of human behavior.

He is the author of several detective novels starring private investigator Aaron Asherfeld: Less Than Meets the Eye, The Body Shop and A Clean Sweep, and a number of shorter works of fiction and non-fiction.

Berlinski is a secular Jew and agnostic. A 2008 Slate magazine profile characterized Berlinski as "a critic, a contrarian, and ... by his own admission ... a crank [...and] zealous skeptic, more concerned with false gods than real ones." In that same article Berlinski said he "got fired from almost every job [he] ever had" before finding a career as a writer as...in the words of David Engber of Slate Magazine...a "maverick intellectual." The same article characterizes Berlinski's viewpoint as "radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy...he's more concerned with what we don't know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn't there and seeks out the things that can't be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia...a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He's merely its most methodical practitioner." In Black Mischief, Berlinski wrote “Our paper became a monograph. When we had completed the details, we rewrote everything so that no one could tell how we came upon our ideas or why. This is the standard in mathematics.”

A critic of evolution, Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a Seattle-based nonthink-tank that is 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." Berlinski is a scathing critic of "Darwinism", yet, "Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, [he] refuses to theorize about the origin of life."

Though the Discovery Institute portrays Berlinski as a scholarly writer and mathematician, Mark Perakh, a critic of the intelligent design movement, contends that Berlinski's writings are not scientific, but popular, and that Berlinski "has no known record of his own contribution to the development of mathematics or of any other science."

Berlinski, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates Michael Behe and William A. Dembski, tutored Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book The Church of Liberalism.

Berlinski was a longtime friend of the late Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920—1996), with whom he collaborated on an unfinished and unpublished mathematical polemic that he described as being "devoted to the Darwinian theory of evolution." Berlinski dedicated The Advent of the Algorithm to Schutzenberger.

In his 1996 article, The Deniable Darwin, published in Commentary magazine, Berlinski says he denies evolution due to the appearance "at once" of an astonishing number of novel biological structures in the Cambrian explosion, the lack of major transitional fossils transitional sequences, the lack of recent significant evolution in sharks, the evolution of the eye, and the purported failure of evolutionary biology to explain a range of phenomena ranging from the sexual cannibalism of redback spiders to why women are not born with a tail. In responding to Berlinski's arguments, marine biologist Wesley R. Elsberry comments: "I personally like my 'at onces' to refer to events significantly shorter than ten million years." Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education described Berlinski's arguments in The Deniable Darwin as:

Berlinski appeared in the 2008 film 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." 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.

Non-fiction books

• A Tour of the Calculus (Vintage, 1996) ISBN 0-679-42645-0
• Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck (Boston: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988) ISBN 0-688-04404-2
• Deniable Darwin & Other Essays. (Discovery Institute, October 2009) ISBN 0-9790141-2-3
• Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics, 2005, ISBN 0-679-64234-X
• Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World, 2000, ISBN 0-684-84392-7
• The Advent of the Algorithm: The 300-Year Journey from an Idea to the Computer, (Harcourt, 2001), ISBN 0-15-601391-6
• The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World, (Harcourt, 2000), ISBN 0-15-100338-6
• The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky: Astrology and the Art of Prediction, 2003, ISBN 0-15-100527-3
• The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, (New York: Crown Forum, 2008), ISBN 0-307-39626-6

Fiction books

• A Clean Sweep. (St Martins Press, 1993) ISBN 0-312-08744-6
• Less Than Meets the Eye: An Aaron Asherfeld Mystery. (St Martins Press, 1994) ISBN 0-312-11298-X
• The Body Shop: An Aaron Asherfeld Mystery. (St Martins Press, 1996) ISBN 0-312-13935-7

Articles

• "The End of Materialistic Science", Forbes Asap magazine, 1996
• "The Deniable Darwin", Commentary, 1996
• "Has Darwin met his match?" (Letter), Commentary, 2003
• "What Brings a World into Being?", Commentary, 2001