Posted on 08/17/2006 11:04:51 AM PDT by publius1
Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter Coultergeist A Review by Jerry Coyne
H. L. Mencken once responded to a question asked by many of his readers: "If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?" His answer was, "Why do men go to zoos?" Sadly, Mencken is not here to ogle the newest creature in the American Zoo: the Bleached Flamingo, otherwise known as Ann Coulter. This beast draws crowds by its frequent, raucous calls, eerily resembling a human voice, and its unearthly appearance, scrawny and pallid. (Wikipedia notes that "a white or pale flamingo ... is usually unhealthy or suffering from a lack of food.") The etiolated Coulter issued a piercing squawk this spring with her now-notorious book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Its thesis, harebrained even by her standards, is that liberals are an atheistic lot who have devised a substitute religion, replete with the sacraments of abortion, feminism, coddling of criminals, and -- you guessed it -- bestiality. Liberals also have their god, who, like Coulter's, is bearded and imposing. He is none other than Charles Darwin. But the left-wing god is malevolent, for Coulter sees Darwin as the root cause of every ill afflicting our society, not to mention being responsible for the historical atrocities of Hitler and Stalin.
The furor caused by her vicious remarks about the 9/11 widows ("I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.") has distracted people from the main topic of her book: evolutionary biology, or rather the pathetic pseudoscientific arguments of its modern fundamentalist challenger, Intelligent Design (ID). This occupies four of Coulter's eleven chapters. Enamored of ID, and unable to fathom a scientific reason why biologists don't buy it, Coulter suggests that scientists are an evil sub-cabal of atheist liberals, a group so addicted to godlessness that they must hide at all costs the awful "truth" that evolution didn't happen. She accuses evolutionists of brainwashing children with phony fossils and made-up "evidence," turning the kids into "Darwiniacs" stripped of all moral (i.e., biblical) grounding and prone to become beasts and genocidal lunatics. To Coulter, biologists are folks who, when not playing with test tubes or warping children's minds, encourage people to have sex with dogs. (I am not making this up.)
Any sane person who starts reading Godless will soon ask, Does Coulter really believe this stuff? The answer is that it doesn't much matter. What's far more disturbing than Coulter herself (and she's plenty disturbing: On the cover photo she has the scariest eyes since Rasputin) is the fact that Americans are lapping up her latest prose like a pack of starved cats. The buyers cannot be political opponents who just want to enjoy her "humor"; like me, those people wouldn't enrich her by a dime. (I didn't pay for my copy.) Rather, a lot of folks apparently like her ravings -- suggesting that, on some level at least, they must agree with her. And this means that the hundreds of thousands of Americans who put Coulter at the top of the best-seller lists see evolution as a national menace.
Well, that's hardly news. We've known for years that nearly half of all Americans believe in the Genesis account of creation, and only about 10 percent want evolution taught in public schools without mentioning ID or other forms of creationism. But it's worth taking up the cudgels once again, if only to show that, contrary to Coulter's claim, accepting Darwinism is not tantamount to endorsing immorality and genocide.
First, one has to ask whether Coulter (who, by the way, attacks me in her book) really understands the Darwinism she rejects. The answer is a resounding No. According to the book's acknowledgments, Coulter was tutored in the "complex ideas" of evolution by David Berlinski, a science writer; Michael Behe, a third-rate biologist at Lehigh University (whose own department's website disowns his bizarre ideas); and William Dembski, a fairly bright theologian who went off the intellectual rails and now peddles creationism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. These are the "giants" of the ID movement, which shows how retarded it really is. Learning biology from this lot is like learning elocution from George W. Bush.
As expected with such tutors, the Darwinism decried by Coulter is the usual distorted cardboard cut-out. All she does is parrot the ID line: There are no transitional fossils; natural selection can't create true novelty; some features of organisms could not have evolved and therefore must have been designed by an unspecified supernatural agent. And her "research" method consists of using quotes taken out of context, scouring biased secondary sources, and distorting what appears in the scientific literature. Judging by the shoddy documentation of the evolution section, I'm not convinced that the rest of the book isn't based on equally shoddy research. At any rate, I won't belabor the case that Coulter makes for ID, as I've already shown in TNR that her arguments are completely bogus.
What is especially striking is Coulter's failure to tell us what she really believes about how the earth's species got here. It's clear that she thinks God had a direct hand in it, but beyond that we remain unenlightened. IDers believe in limited amounts of evolution. Does Coulter think that mammals evolved from reptiles? If not, what are those curious mammal-like reptiles that appear exactly at the right time in the fossil record? Did humans evolve from ape-like primates, or did the Designer conjure us into existence all at once? How did all those annoying fossils get there, in remarkable evolutionary order?
And, when faced with the real evidence that shows how strongly evolution trumps ID, she clams up completely. What about the massive fossil evidence for human evolution -- what exactly were those creatures 2 million years ago that had human-like skeletons but ape-like brains? Did a race of Limbaughs walk the earth? And why did God -- sorry, the Intelligent Designer -- give whales a vestigial pelvis, and the flightless kiwi bird tiny, nonfunctional wings? Why do we carry around in our DNA useless genes that are functional in similar species? Did the Designer decide to make the world look as though life had evolved? What a joker! And the Designer doesn't seem all that intelligent, either. He must have been asleep at the wheel when he designed our appendix, back, and prostate gland.
There are none so blind as those who will not see, and Coulter knows that myopia about evolution is a lucrative game. After all, she is a millionaire, reveling in her status as a celebrity and stalked by ignorazzis. I have never seen anyone enjoy her own inanity so much.
But after ranting for nearly a hundred pages about evolution, Coulter finally gives away the game on page 277: "God exists whether or not archaeopteryx ever evolved into something better. If evolution is true, then God created evolution." Gee. Evolution might be true after all! But she's just spent a hundred pages telling us it isn't! What gives? As Tennessee Williams's Big Daddy said, there's a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room.
What's annoying about Coulter (note: there's more than one thing!) is that she insistently demands evidence for evolution (none of which she'll ever accept), but requires not a shred of evidence for her "alternative hypothesis." She repeatedly assures us that God exists (not just any God -- the Christian God), that there is only one God (she's no Hindu, folks), that we are made in the image of said God, that the Christian Bible, like Antonin Scalia's Constitution, "is not a 'living' document" (that is, not susceptible to changing interpretation; so does she think that Genesis is literally true?), and that God just might have used evolution as part of His plan. What makes her so sure about all this? And how does she know that the Supreme Being, even if It exists, goes by the name of Yahweh, rather than Allah, Wotan, Zeus, or Mabel? If Coulter just knows these things by faith alone, she should say so, and then tell us why she's so sure that what Parsees or Zunis just know is wrong. I, for one, am not prepared to believe that Ann Coulter is made in God's image without seeing some proof.
Moreover, if evolution is wrong, why is it the central paradigm of biology? According to Coulter, it's all a big con game. In smoky back rooms at annual meetings, evolutionists plot ways to jam Darwin down America's throat, knowing that even though it is scientifically incorrect, Darwinism (Coulter says) "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing -- screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child -- Darwin says it will benefit humanity!"
Unfortunately for Coulter (but fortunately for humanity), science doesn't work this way. Scientists gain fame and high reputation not for propping up their personal prejudices, but for finding out facts about nature. And if evolution really were wrong, the renegade scientist who disproved it -- and showed that generations of his predecessors were misled -- would reach the top of the scientific ladder in one leap, gaining fame and riches. All it would take to trash Darwinism is a simple demonstration that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, or that our closest genetic relative is the rabbit. There is no cabal, no back-room conspiracy. Instead, the empirical evidence for evolution just keeps piling up, year after year.
As for biologists' supposed agenda of godlessness -- how ridiculous! Yes, a lot of scientists are atheists, but most have better things to do than deliberately destroy people's faith. This goes doubly for the many scientists -- roughly a third of them -- who are religious. After all, one of the most vocal (and effective) opponents of ID is Ken Miller of Brown University, a devout Catholic.
The real reason Coulter goes after evolution is not because it's wrong, but because she doesn't like it -- it doesn't accord with how she thinks the world should be. That's because she feels, along with many Americans, that "Darwin's theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality." What's so sad -- not so much for Coulter as for Americans as a whole -- is that this idea is simply wrong. Darwinism, after all, is just a body of thought about the origin and change of biological diversity, not a handbook of ethics. (I just consulted my copy of The Origin of Species, and I swear that there's nothing in there about abortion or eugenics, much less about shtupping one's secretary.)
If Coulter were right, evolutionists would be the most beastly people on earth, not to be trusted in the vicinity of a goat. But I've been around biologists all of my adult life, and I can tell you that they're a lot more civil than, say, Coulter. It's a simple fact that you don't need the Bible -- or even religion -- to be moral. Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews, who don't follow the New Testament, usually behave responsibly despite this problem; and atheists and agnostics derive morality from non-biblical philosophy. In fact, one of the most ethical people I know is Coulter's version of the Antichrist: the atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins (more about that below). Dawkins would never say -- as Coulter does -- that Cindy Sheehan doesn't look good in shorts, that Al Franken resembles a monkey, or that 9/11 widows enjoyed the deaths of their husbands. Isn't there something in the Bible about doing unto others?
The mistake of equating Darwinism with a code of behavior leads Coulter into her most idiotic accusation: that the Holocaust and numberless murders of Stalin can be laid at Darwin's door. "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists." Anyone who is religious should be very careful about saying something like this, because, throughout history, more killings have been done in the name of religion than of anything else. What's going on in the Middle East, and what happened in Serbia and Northern Ireland? What was the Inquisition about, and the Crusades, and the slaughter following the partition of India? Religion, of course -- or rather, religiously inspired killing. (Come to think of it, the reason Hitler singled out the Jews is that Christians regarded them for centuries as the killers of Christ. And I don't remember any mention of Darwinism in the Moscow Doctors' Trial.) If Darwin is guilty of genocide, then so are God, Jesus, Brahma, Martin Luther, and countless popes.
As Coulter well knows, the misuse of an idea for evil purposes does not mean that idea is wrong. In fact, she accuses liberals of making this very error: She attacks them for worrying that the message of racial inequality conveyed by the book The Bell Curve could promote genocide: "Only liberals could interpret a statement that people have varying IQs as a call to start killing people." Back at you, Ann: Only conservatives could interpret a statement that species evolved as a call to start killing people.
Coulter clearly knows better. I conclude that the trash-talking blonde bit is just a shtick (admittedly, a clever one) calculated to make her rich and famous. (Look at her website, where she whines regularly that she is not getting enough notice.) Her hyper-conservativism seems no more grounded than her faith. She has claimed that the Bible is her favorite book, she is rumored to go to church, and on the cover of Godless you see a cross dangling tantalizingly in her décolletage. But could anybody who absorbed the Sermon on the Mount write, as she does of Richard Dawkins, "I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell"? Well, I wouldn't want Coulter to roast (there's not much meat there anyway), but I wish she'd shut up and learn something about evolution. Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They're about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye know them.
You need a refund on your world history education. Stalin was a follower of Lysenko who persecuted people who believed in evolution, or even genetics.
Hitler, who believed in a master race, was...what?
I think he professed something called ... Christianity. "Gott Mit Uns" and all that.
Please tell us, which law of 'basic physics' does evolution supposedly violate? I'd warn you not to say the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, unless you wish to make a major fool of yourself.
Have you actually ever read a real science book on evolution, or do you just recite verbatim the content of creationist websites (all of which you would realize is wrong if you opened your mind up, accepted a bit of humility, and were willing to learn something...)
That is like saying "the only theoreical foundation that physics really provides is physics itself."
IOW, semantically null.
Long list of Scientists who believed in Creation Another long list of scientists who believed in Creation (Includes Gregor Mendel the father of Genetics)
a. Hundreds (which I will grant although I didn't count) of these (how many are in the Life Sciences?) versus MILLIONS of scientists gives you .001% in the most optimistic scenario. Not much support, really.
I wish that you could have told that to Gregor Mendel, the father of Genetics. If we could discover genetics without knowledge of DNA, then it's simply implausible to think we wouldn't continue to ask the questions to investigate the cause of genetics and thus find DNA.
He wasn't alone by any means. "Understanding evolution is how viral and bacterial agents are identified and dispatched." Not really. Selection plays a role in antibiotic resistance, and mutations do to. But neither selection nor mutations by themselves are evolution. And neither selection nor mutations have been shown to create new species. The study of protein structures are offering cures. But thats not evolution either. I'm not aware of anything that evolution has offered to help dispatch a bacteria or virus.
Then you aren't paying attention. And I guess you are unaware of the New York mosquitos which have, indeed, created a new species (since they can't mate with the above-ground species).
You try like the dickens to knock down TToE, but:
You have no scientific alternative
You cannot butress CR/ID.
I suspect you just like to "argue" (although your attempted riposte's really don't rise to that level). But it is sad that you are helping to dumb down America.
I will pray for you. I will also ask God to take into consideration your emotion overriding the clear science before you.
I am sure you don't mean to create the damage that you are doing.
As long as you attribute enjoying your husband's death as reasonable, then Coulter's arguments could be so construed. She is an embarrassment to what used to be conservative causes. She makes many misstatements of evolutionary theory; these misstatements have been corrected long before she decided to misuse them again. There is no excuse for such actions (well, maybe Molly Ivins has an excuse.)
Half the team that invented the Hi-Fi Speakers?
ID and creation make absolutely zero specific, falisifiable, fulfilled predictions. Evolution does. Of course, not every prediction of every one of the thousands of hypotheses of which evolutionary theory is comprised have proven correct, so, as with any theory, it has been adjusted and improved as new data has come along. This is one of the virtues of science.
Here's a typical prediction of evolution (from the link):
"Almost all animals make Vitamin C inside their bodies. It was predicted that humans are descended from creatures that could do this, and that we had lost this ability. (There was a loss-of-function mutation, which didn't matter because our high-fruit diet was rich in Vitamin C.) When human DNA was studied, scientists found a gene which is just like the Vitamin C gene in dogs and cats. However, our copy has been turned off."
Can you give one, just one, specific prediction made by ID or creationism? By specific, I mean as in pertaining to the discovery of a specific fossil, a specific gene, a specific type of animal or plant, a specific distribution of a particular biological population, etc.? ("Irreducible complexity must exist" is not a specific prediction, mind you.)
Nice hit.. Bulls eye and the bull is flowing..
Hitler was not religious, he USED religion to promote his cause.
lol...unutterable? It is interesting that you seem to recognize the difference and not want the similarity. Yet, the deference is my deference. I can do that, right? Even without your permission? Unlike the DI's, G-d knows exactly who we are, and the stumblin' bumblin' is just the honesty of life. We know that reality as children- then forget it by the convenience of youth- and hopefully seek it again, as men. All the best to ya...
Swahili is my birth tongue. Okay?
Ah. That explains your ability and my disability :)
= D
lol... thanks! Divers-ity 1st, right?
"A - Unfalsifiable; That God created everything is unfalsifiable and violates methodological naturalism. This is cannot be confirmed. "
I believe it will be confirmed by direct observation. I don't give a flip about "methodological naturalism" because by definition that's a refusal to consider any alternative other than evolution.
However I cannot propose a test right now. So for the moment this hypothesis remains unfalsifiable. Science has often put forth hypotheses that were initially untestable when first proposed. This is no different.
B) Complexity, Variety and Adaptability in Living Organisms and Ecological Systems - Inherent and complete in original populations as created; manifested (and subject to degradation) over time through genetic variation and natural selection
B-Falsified; organisms do not appear fully formed in the fossil record.
Actually, they do. See the Cambrian Explosion. There are some microscopic multi-celled organisms that have been found that have been proposed as precursors, but that hardly qualifies, and I recently read a work very critical of those microscopic claims.
C) Massive amounts of Coded Genetic Information - Inherent and complete in original populations as created; sum total has steadily declined over time via mutational degradation
C - Falsified; genetic code is not complete and contains massive amounts of noncoding DNA, endogenous retroviruses, and pseudogenes. Also, the genomes of organisms are related and several are ancestral.
Careful here. How is genetic code incomplete? Are you just disputing everything that was claimed? If it's not complete, then how does it work?
Also, keep in mind that we don't fully understand the genome yet. Coding DNA was defined as "protein coding". However a second code was revealed in DNA just in the past month. So don't assume all that DNA is useless, because we aren't there yet.
Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA
That the genomes of organisms are related can apply equally to common design as to common descent. Look at the massive amount of changes that have to occur between a monkey and man. And where are the fossilized remains of all these changes? Nowhere.
What's more the evidence is that mutations cause a degradation of the gene pool over time. I can point over 800 inheritable diseases, but I know of only 2 mutations that are even proposed as possibly beneficial, and one of those is the disease Sickle Cell Anemia and Trait, which is beneficial because the body constantly fights the deformed blood cells which gives it a small advantage when contracting malaria.
D) Similarities, ranging from Genetic to Morphological, between various Organisms - Indicative of Creator’s prerogative to employ similar or identical structures or information sequences for similar structures or similar functions in different organisms
D - Falsified; The existence of noncoding DNA, pseudogenes, and endogenous retroviruses do not support creation. Also, there is no way to confirm the Creator's intentions nor is there any way to confirm a Creator. Also,
You find similar traits developing on different evolutionary trees, which does not support evolution. It's more to be expected from a common designer. You have a term for this, it's called convergent evolution. Just another area that real life didn't match evolutionary explanations and you adjusted your model.
Your response didn't really even match the prediction.
E) Billions of Organisms quickly Buried in sedimentary Rock Layers laid down by Water all over the Earth - Global Flood & aftermath
E) Falsified; Geologic Columns show no evidence of a global flood and geologic layers point to millions of years of formation due to gradualism and intermittent rapid-change.
There is much evidence to the contrary. Polystate trees span millions of years of geologic change. Mount Saint Helens showed us just how fast multiple layers of strata and huge canyons could be created. And also provided a model for how polystrate trees occurred. The lack of erosion in the layers of the grand canyon argues that they were layed down rapidly. As well as the relative infrequency of burrowings.
F) The Ice Age - Post-Flood climate compensation
"F) Falsified; there is no evidence of a global flood and ice ages are due to a combination of the position of continental plates, changes in the Earth's orbit in Milankovich cycles, et cetra. "
There is substantial evidence if you don't close your mind to it. The dinosaur graveyards are evidence of huge water catastophes. Evolutionary scientists assume these were local events of outstanding magnitude, because they just can't imagine a global flood. There is a lot more evidence than this.
Are polar ice sheets only 4500 years old?
G) Entropy Law as formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics - Concurs, indicating a beginning (concurrent with or close to beginning of time) followed by constant degradation
G) Falsified; entropy is misstated and Creation violates the 2nd Law due to the inordinate amount of free energy that does not dissipate. Also, a Creator that is supernatural is unfalsifiable.
You haven't falsified this. I don't think Entropy is mistated, but I'll admit it's often misapplied. Entropy in the time frame we've measured, isn't a strong argument. There are some on-going arguments regarding entropy of the earth's magnetic field that may favor a young earth. But again, this is a valid prediction, that may eventually be confirmed or falsified.
There are also things like the spirals in galaxies don't match the expectations of an old age. Some of the evolutionist explanations of why the spirals are still distinct stretch credibility.
H) Apparent Order or Sequence in Fossil Record - General pattern of ecological zones quickly buried from lower to higher elevations; variations expected
H) Falsified; Geologic layers show formation over millions of years, not aligning itself with catastrophism.
Only according to one set of assumptions. There are many evidences of catastrophism as previously discussed.
I) Erratic “Ages” given by Radiometric and various other Uniformitarian Processes - Residual effect of catastrophic processes and conditions during the flood
I) Falsified; Erratic ages result due to contamination and such factors are considered during dating, as per standard practice.
If there is that much contamination, then how do we know any of the dates are correct? Creationists have put forth evidence that contradicts radiometric dating such as radioisotope halos and scientific research is ongoing. See ICR.org's date projects for more info.
Yeah but our gene for vitamin C Synthesis was more like gerbils than the monkey's evolution claims we descended from. So vitamin C synthesis really doesn't support evolution in any way.
So, if Hitler misuses Christianity, that says nothing about Christianity. But if Hitler misused Darwin, that says bad things about Darwin. I think I have it now.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say most of the history of life on Earth was OVER before Hitler was born. How does that sound?
That is pure speculation to pound a round peg into a square hole. You must pine for the days when there was no internet to check your facts.
"Called "Tiktaalik" by scientists, the fish lived in shallow, swampy waters. Most remarkably, the creature, which was less than 3 feet long, had the body of a fish but the jaws, ribs and limb-like fins seen in the earliest land mammals." The claim that the stubby little fossil fins are "limb-like" is a real hoot. The fish doesn't even have fins as large as expected for its size. The scientists are claiming the fish walked around on the ground out of water and breathing air. This is pure make believe speculation. No evidence exists that the fish is anything more than just another species.
The excitement about the Tiktaalik fossil is puzzling. Modern-day seals have fins and waddle around on the ground. Modern-day catfish have fins and walk around on the ground. They can live out of water for a long time with dying. Tiktaalik does not provide any support for evolution.
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Shalom Israel
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