From Michel Houellebecq’s 2010 Paris Review interview:
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that you are “an old Calvinist pain-in-the-ass.” What do you mean?
HOUELLEBECQ
I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death. This resembles the Calvinist notion of predestination, in which people are born saved or damned, without being able to do a thing about it. And I am a curmudgeonly pain in the ass because I refuse to diverge from the scientific method or to believe there is a truth beyond science.
Biblioklept 
A better title would have been thus: “Wherein Michel Houellebecq Disingenuously Professes Two Contradictory Beliefs.”
LikeLike
Agreed.
LikeLike