This Sir Fred Hoyle?
Posted on 06/30/2006 12:42:04 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The most amazing thing about Godless is the amount of intellectual meat Ann Coulter has packed into its pages.
Godless: The Church of Liberalism
by Ann Coulter
(Crown Forum, 310 pages, $27.95)
What's most amazing about Ann Coulter's book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, is the amount of intellectual meat she packs into 281 breezy, barb-filled pages. Among the topics the blonde bomb-thrower discusses in some depth are the following: liberal jurisprudence, privacy rights and abortion, Joe Wilson's modest career and inflated ego, and the solid record of failure in American public schools. The topics of Intelligent Design and Darwinism, to which the last eighty pages of text are devoted, are analyzed in even greater detail.
As one would expect from an author with a legal background, Supreme Court cases are high on Coulter's hit-list -- especially the idea of a "living Constitution." Citing various cases-in-point, Coulter shows that this popular doctrine is nothing more than a paralegal pretext for making the Constitution say whatever liberal judges want it to say. Though such a philosophy grants to the nation's founding document all the integrity of a bound and gagged assault victim, it at least has the virtue of mirroring liberals' self-referential view of morality.
Another dogma that Coulter skewers is the liberal commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Punish the Perp." This counterintuitive principle not only rejects the link between incarceration and lower crime rates, it also permits benevolent judges (like Clinton federal court nominee Frederica Massiah-Jackson) to shorten the sentence of child rapists so that other innocent children can pay the price for society's sins.
An unexpected bonus in this chapter is the author's extended sidebar on Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of Boston who, as his own correspondence shows, knew Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty but chose, for ideological and financial reasons, to portray them as innocent victims. In a related chapter, "The Martyr: Willie Horton," Coulter provides detailed information about Horton's crimes, Michael Dukakis' furlough program, and the precise nature of the Horton ads aired in the 1988 presidential campaign
CONTINUING THE RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, Coulter asserts in chapter five that abortion is the "holiest sacrament" of the "church of liberalism." For women this sacrament secures their "right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with." A corollary of this less-than-exalted principle is the right to suck the brains out of partially born infants. How far liberal politicians will go to safeguard this sacrament whose name must not be spoken (euphemisms are "choice," "reproductive freedom," and "family planning") is shown by an amendment offered by Senator Chuck Schumer that would exclude anti-abortion protestors from bankruptcy protection. How low these same pols will go is illustrated by the character assassination of Judge Charles Pickering -- a man honored by the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers but slimed by liberals at his confirmation hearing as racially insensitive. Coulter notes that the unspoken reason for this "Borking" of Pickering was the judge's prior criticism of Roe v. Wade.
The single chapter that Coulter's critics have honed in on is the one that exposes the liberal "Doctrine of Infallibility." This religiously resonant phrase applies to individuals who promote the Left's partisan agenda while immunizing themselves from criticism by touting their victim-status. In addition to the 9/11 "Jersey Girls," Coulter identifies Joe Wilson, Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and John Murtha as persons who possess, at least by Maureen Dowd's lights, "absolute moral authority." Curiously, this exalted status isn't accorded victims who don't push liberal agendas. Perhaps the fact that Republican veterans outnumber their Democrat counterparts in Congress, 87 to 62, has something to do with this inconsistency.
Coulter's next chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," focuses on the partisanship, compensation, and incompetence level of American teachers. A crucial statistic in these pages concerns the "correlation [that exists] between poor student achievement and time spent in U.S. public schools." In this regard, comments by Thomas Sowell and Al Shanker stand out. Sowell notes that college students with low SAT and ACT scores are more likely to major in education and that "teachers who have the lowest scores are the most likely to remain in the profession." From a different perspective, the late President of the American Federation of Teachers stated, with refreshing bluntness, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." The words of John Dewey, a founder of America's public education system, also fit nicely into Coulter's state-of-the-classroom address: "You can't make Socialists out of individualists -- children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." Coulter responds, "You also can't make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection."
The last third of Godless focuses on matters scientific. Chapter seven, "The Left's War on Science," serves as an appetizer for Coulter's evolutionary piece de resistance. Prior to that main course, Coulter provides a litany of examples that illustrate the left's contempt for scientific data that doesn't comport with its worldview. Exhibits include the mendacious marketing of AIDS as an equal opportunity disease, the hysterical use of anecdotal evidence to ban silicon breast implants, and the firestorm arising from Lawrence Summers's heretical speculation about male and female brain differences.
THE REMAINING CHAPTERS OF GODLESS all deal with Darwinism. Nowhere else can one find a tart-tongued compendium of information that not only presents a major argument for Intelligent Design but also exposes the blatant dishonesty of "Darwiniacs" who continue to employ evidence (such as the Miller-Urey experiment, Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings, and the famous peppered moth experiment) that they know is outdated or fraudulent.
Within this bracing analysis, Coulter employs the observations of such biological and philosophical heavyweights as Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins, Michael Behe, and Karl Popper. The price of the whole book is worth the information contained in these chapters about the statistical improbability of random evolution, the embarrassing absence of "transitional" fossils, and the inquisitorial attitude that prevails among many scientists (and most liberals) when discussing these matters. Unlike biologist Richard Lewontin, who candidly admits that a prior commitment to materialism informs his allegiance to evolution, most of his colleagues (and certainly most of the liberal scribblers Coulter sets on the road to extinction) won't concede that Darwinism is a corollary, rather than a premise, of their godlessness.
Coulter's final chapter serves as a thought-provoking addendum to her searing cross-examination of evolution's star witnesses. "The Aped Crusader" displays the devastating social consequences that have thus far attended Darwinism. From German and American eugenicists (including Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger), to Aryan racists, to the infanticidal musings of Princeton's Peter Singer, Darwinian evolution boasts a political and philosophical heritage that could only be envied by the likes of Charles Manson. Yet it is a history ignored by liberals for whom Darwin's theory provides what they want above all else -- a creation myth that sanctifies their sexual urges, sanctions abortion, and disposes of God.
Coulter's book is clearly not a systematic argument for the idea that liberalism is a godless religion. Indeed, prior to the material on evolution, the concept is treated more as a clever theme for chapter headings than as a serious intellectual proposition. In those final chapters, however, Coulter manages to present a cogent, sustained argument that actually begins to link modern liberalism (or more specifically, leftism) to an atheistic perspective. At the very least Coulter succeeds in raising an important issue -- namely, that American courts currently ignore the religious or quasi-religious character of a philosophy that pervades public institutions and is propagated with public funds. This fact, if honestly recognized, would render contemporary church-state jurisprudence untenable. A Court taking these arguments seriously would have to recognize that all philosophies, including "liberalism," swim in the same intellectual current as religion.
THUS FAR, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA have focused almost all their attention on Coulter's take-no-prisoners rhetorical style -- and particularly on the "heartless" remarks about those 9/11 widows who seem to be "enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." Clearly, diplomatic language is not Coulter's forte, as one would also gather from this representative zinger: "I don't particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven."
What undercuts the liberals' case against Coulter on this score, however, is their own (not always tacit) endorsement of vile epithets that are regularly directed against President Bush and his supporters by the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and a gaggle of celebrity politicos. Coulter employs the same linguistic standard against liberals (with a touch of humor) that they regularly use (with somber faces and dogmatic conviction) when they accuse conservatives of being racist homophobes who gladly send youngsters to war under false pretences to line the pockets of Halliburton executives. Hate-speech of this stripe is old-hat for leftists.
Until Air America, Helen Thomas, and most Democrat constituencies alter their rhetoric, I see no reason for conservatives to denounce Coulter for using, more truthfully, the same harsh language that leftists have employed, with no regard for accuracy, since the time of Lenin. When liberals denounce communist tyrants as fervently as they do real Nazis, then it will be time for Coulter to cool the rhetoric. Until that time her "verbal reprisals" serve a useful function within an intellectual marketplace that resembles a commodities pit more than a debating society.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, California. He is a regular columnist for San Diego's North County Times. His book reviews have also appeared in the American Enterprise Magazine, First Things, and Touchstone.
This is totally amazing. Ann makes a some off-the-wall 'quote' and these guys fall hook line and sinker. They then throw it in our face only to be told that those guys not only believed in evolution but wrote books supporting that position. Ann has made millions off of their gullibility.
Every single living thing on Earth has DNA. Not only that but in that code every single one has a box of the same code that instructs the first cell how to get started. All the forms of life on Earth can be classified to fit on a large tree of life. A tree which was constructed long before the discovery of DNA but fit very nicely the results of DNA testing latter on, making the claim for one root rather easy.
Meanwhile Ann is happily whistling on the way to the bank!
This Sir Fred Hoyle?
I'm not a terribly good communicator so I'm not surprised I have confused you.
I disagree that God exists and that his believed existence has any bearing on human morals.
What Creationists generally claim is that the existence of God influences our choice of morals; that without God we would act no better than animals, red in tooth and claw. They actually go further than this and claim that if the 'belief' in God is absent, humans do act like animals. In other words our actions are predicated on our belief in God and the list of 'morals' documented in the Bible. This seems to fly in the face of our being created in the image of God.
"What we would have, instead, is social conventions that can change on a whim. There is no reason to prefer taking care of sick children to the Spartan convention of leaving them to die of exposure. Can you provide a justification? Can you provide a justification for taking care of the elderly instead of sending them off to die so they won't consume resources? Can you provide a justification for taking care of anyone, rather than demanding that only the strong survive?"
For one thing, the 'survival of the fittest' does not mean 'survival of the strongest' nor 'survival of the most brutish', it means survival of those that reproduce the most successfully. In some cases this means the strongest, as with Lions where males will drive off competitors and kill off their offspring, but in many cases it means those that cooperate the most within a community.
Cooperation has been observed in many animals, from gopher colonies to Chimp family groups. We can convincingly hypothesize, like Dawkins does, about why groups of animals evolve altruism and cooperation, but whether or not we believe those hypotheses, altruism and cooperation does exist in the animal world. Those actions are not exclusive to humans.
"Lack of evidence [that animals form their own moral system]"
There is quite a range of intellect in the animal world, from nothing in flies to highly complex in Chimps. Unfortunately none of them can communicate easily with humans so our image of their level of consciousness is necessarily incomplete. The longer we work with animals and test their ability to form independent ideas, the higher our estimation of their ability to think. Chimps routinely create hierarchies of relatedness within their groups and interact differently with the more closely related members of the group. Those actions include altruistic acts, general cooperation and even punishment for breaking the group's 'rules'.
You may dismiss those actions as mere 'instinct', but that would conflict with observations. Much of the Chimp's activity is instinctual, they have evolved to prefer those particular actions over disharmony and conflict, but much also appears to be learned. They have no ability to preserve those rules outside of physically teaching the next generation so the number and complexity of those 'rules' has to be much less than our own.
If God does not exist (as I believe) then the actions we observe in Chimps and Gorillas allows us to predict the range of human cultures, given of course our ability for abstract thought, communication, memory, and ability to preserve in writing the consequences of our and other group's past actions.
Given the evolutionary predispositions of humans (as documented in our nearest relatives) and our ability to preserve and analyze past events, even without God we would have, at some point in our history, had much the same 'morals' as we do today.
Evolution states that as a community oriented animal we would develop altruism, cooperation, and familial support systems just as we see in other animals. Why you think humans would end up being brutish as the rule rather than the exception is beyond me.
This Sir Francis Crick?
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Crick stated his view that the idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that, an imagined idea. For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years. Crick felt that it was important that evolution by natural selection be taught in public schools and that it was regrettable that English schools had compulsory religious instruction. Crick felt that a new scientific world view was rapidly being established, and predicted that once the detailed workings of the brain were eventually revealed, erroneous Christian concepts about the nature of man and the world would no longer be tenable; traditional conceptions of the "soul" would be replaced by a new understanding of the physical basis of mind. He was skeptical of organized religion and harbored doubts about the existence of god, although he was not an atheist as other sources have claimed.
That's me your talking about and I intend to stay on, not off! It was actually a late night Friday post and Its good to see so many other conservatives who disagree with Ann on this point. Even Issac Newton believed in alchemy so I can forgive the otherwise spot on Ann for this screw up but I sure won't let it slip by without comment. It's invincible ignorance such as this that allows the enemies of conservatives to paint us as flat Earthers.
GPS off the top of my head.
Triginometry.
There is a constellation of a dozen or so (can't remember the exact number) satellites in low earth orbit. Each of these satellites emits an ultra precise, coded clock signal. The satellites know exactly where they are in earth orbit.
A GPS receiver takes these signals and calculates the position on earth based on the received satellite signals.
My position is not irrational. It is actually very rational. It only requires faith in something you cannot see, but of which you see an abundance of evidence.
The same COULD be said for evolution. However, the evolutionists deride faith and expect everything to be based on evidence in hand.
The dismissal of an intelligent designer puts you in the uncomfortable position of having to produce a rational explaination for anger, happiness, humor, sympathy, sadness and conscience.
Good luck.
I would think that your acceptance of a non-God ID would put you in the uncomfortable position of having to produce a rational explanation of why you place God secondary to the almighty ID.
A rational explanation has been presented over and over; several times on this thread alone.
I think your distant relatives would have worded their (your) derogatory and demeaning statement as: "However, the heliocentrists deride faith and expect everything to be based on evidence in hand."
It's good to see that so many of Ann's references disagree with Ann on this point!
Fine. As of now, I'm out of your looney muck discussions.
"1. Eminent scientist and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyles said he couldn't accept evolution, as too improbable (apparently from a statistics and probability perspective). Did Ann invent this quote?
Sir Fred Hoyle doubted the ability of Abiogenesis to create life on Earth and felt that Earth was seeded from space (Panspermia). Hoyle was not a biologist, nor a chemist. Funny thing is he had no trouble supposing the evolution of viruses in space and in fact proposed that 'space made viruses' created the diversity we now see in Earthly life. His views lend nothing to the idea of ID or Creationism.
Any probability calculations that can be done for either Abiogenesis or Evolution have to make assumptions that are no more than guesses. Every probability calculation that I have seen for Abiogenesis makes rather poor choices for initial conditions, preferring to build a strawman over accuracy.
"2.DNA scientist Crick could not accept evolution, apparently as not explaining the complexity of DNA. Did Ann invent this quote?
Crick did accept Evolution, he doubted Abiogenesis and toyed with the idea of Panspermia just as Hoyle did.
"Also, are these two scientists know-nothing creationists?
Hoyle's argument against Abiogenesis is nothing but a strawman that has been refuted many times. It is meaningless. Included in those refutations is a work by Manfred Eigen (Who is Nobel Prize-winning chemist)
BTW, Hoyle also disliked the BB. He was wrong there too.
Crick, although a Physicist, had a much better understanding of chemistry and biology than did Hoyle so needs to be taken more seriously. He did not however doubt Evolution.
No proponent of Evolution doubts the possibility of the origin of life occurring in space, there are huge clouds of matter in space made up of sugars and amino acids, we just doubt the interference of an 'intelligence'.
Just a note, using 'authorities' outside of their field of expertise is a logical fallacy. Coulter is a strong believer in using logical fallacies and false premises as much as possible. Take what she writes with a 'grain of salt'. (You might look up the etymology of that phrase)
The statement was not intended to be derogatory. In fact, it is the truth.
Then would you agree that you would have taken the same geocentrists views of your fore-fathers?
was not intended to be derogatory. In fact, it is the truth.
Then, I would have every right to say that the following is not derogatory and is, in fact, the truth:
Ever own a dog or a cat? It's their possession of such feelings that makes us bond with them so tightly, even though they can't talk. Evolution predicts not only the similarities ( The branch they split on is not that long ago ) but the differences. Emotions are much older than the line of men , they evolved as ways for creatures that have extra information besides their genes (their brains) to survive in the world. The bigger the brain the larger the emotion set grew to deal with it.
Evolution in its purest form is the self replication of information. Information used to be restricted to genetic form locked away in single species and had to wait a generation to be updated. Not anymore. Information is now practically unbounded and changes with the speed of thought. Men really are little different from their animal brothers genetically but this new level of evolution , created by the evolution of ideas, uplifts mankind and makes us radically different in outcome because of this new manner of information movement. Each time the ease at which information is moved is like a whole new evolutionary step, whether it is the invention of speech, the written word, the printing press, the telephone, the computer or the internet itself. Evolution does not stop with the genes: it is more active than ever before right here on the very thread!
Did you see that film of the female lion that adopted a young antelope (I don't remember exactly) and that young antelope was eaten by a male lion? If you had seen the look on the female's face you would understand thta animals have anger, happiness, humor, symphathy, sadness and conscience.
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