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.
Tanks four pesting. Ewer sew wright.
I can back up anything I say about Tiktaalik. You said there weren't any transitionals, I dumped a trainload of them on you, only the tiniest sample of what is out there.
You seem to think if you continue to spew unsubstantiated statements about Tiktaalik's shoulder, then there are no transitionals. Any scientist I cite is a biased scientist? Is that any scientist except the "scientists" at the Institute for Creation Research, Answers In Genesis, ReasonsToBelieve.org, or the prestigious Discovery Institute of Seattle which has thus far only discovered that some announced study needs a same-day rebuttal?
There are litterally thousands of questions about this being anything other than a glorified catfish.
Your ignorance is showing. Please substantiate any claim in the scientific literature that Tiktaalik is any kind of catfish, even an inglorious one.
There should thousands of transitional species and you have this single weak link.
I gave you tons more than that, including fish turning into elephants in 50 steps of "microevolution." (Kudos to Ichneumon and Kathleen Hunt on that one.) Your amnesia looks like Morton's Demon.
Seriously, I linked this earlier post of mine on the subject of transitionals. You are now saying "There should thousands of transitional species and you have this single weak link."
Even in the area of fish-to-amphibian, Tiktaalik is just the latest. There was already a nice series starting with the early lobe-finned Osteolepis and ending with the primitive amphibians Ichthyostega and Acanthostega. Tiktaalik is most of the way to being an amphibian but still a fish. It is very similar to the afore-mentioned early amphibians and also very similar to fish like Panderichthys which precede it. All of which you could have learned for yourself if you had actually used that Internet you wave about to learn something rather than trying to club people with your militant ignorance.
The distance between monkey and man is the same as the distance between this fish and monkey or 1/1,000,000th the distance between man and God.
67.8 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot. Yours is one of those.
My statement nowhere addresses Ann's looks, personal behavior, or life. My statement addresses her statements in "Godless" and where they go wrong. What I raise in my statement sums up my issues.
I'm sure you don't remember, but you and I have already discussed every point Ann raises. We have discussed whether or not there are transitioal fossils, whether the Second Law of Thermodynamics says evolution is impossible, etc. It is theoretically possible therefore that you could realize that nothing in Ann's book would look like anything but the usual bad creationist pennies I have wearily dissected for the last several years on this forum.
The problems with Ann's work do not reflect well on Ann. You can't make that my problem. I hope that's clear enough.
She must give a lot of thought to how to display these blockbuster mental figments of hers.. She truely is a genius.. What I've noticed is, with liberals, she might as well be talking to the "hand"... its the RINOs that truely despise her..
She is the leanest meanest RINO exposer of all time..
They cannot help themselves.. You know, RINOs whom are really liberals in drag.. cross dressed as "conservatives"... Very queer these people.. Ann smokes them out of their hiding places.. And displays them for all to see... Genius is the only word I know of to express it..
Any Ann Coulter thread displays them.. they are helpless against her.. Ever notice how many "hard" "Evos" almost never engage in political discussions.. They would be exposed.. I think..
Amazing that they cannot put the "christian ethos" as the base of America goodness.. When that ethos leaks out of America(as it is), America will die as a country.. They cannot see this.. Eventhough much American history proves it.. However much America was christianized in the past, to that extent, America was good.. And effected the entire world for good.. A lighthouse on a hill it was, still is to some extent..
Ann has got it right.. its the RINOs that are destroying America, its major enemy..
What is a RINO?... That must be her NEXT BOOK..
I suggest you read a few of the refutations of her words on this subject before concluding she did anything more than mouth off about something she knows too little to mouth off about.
Again you guys spin and twist every fossil to try to make it into something it isn't. If anything it is nothing more than an extinct species.
If an organism which clearly shows features of both reptiles and birds including features that are diagnostic for one or the other is not a transitional, what features do you believe a creature half way between a dinosaur and bird should exhibit?
This is an important question if you desire to do more than just repeatedly define transitionals away, performing as it were an argument by redefinition. It goes to your ability to objectively consider evidence rather than just hand-wave it away.
Then you have to remember that he is rebutting a sweeping if far from complete summary of what sort of transitionals there are by stating that Tiktaalik's shoulder connection is in soft tissue. Tiktaalik was maybe one sentence in the post.
The proof they're right is that you can't make them remember where they're wrong. Also, a global conspiracy of evil dumb people is trying to make them look bad by faking evidence against them.
Which reminds me, I need a new fossil press from Darwin Central. All mine will make is stupid brachiopods. I'm smothering in brachiopods. I use them for wall rocks.
I'm sorry, Vade - Tooling went on strike about ten days ago and QC and MGMT have been having a terrible time getting them back to the salt mine. We finally had to resort to Showing them The Tortoises.
Production is now back on line.
What dies would you like?
well, I'm not an osteologist, nor am I a veterinarian, but they all appear to be canines to me - not canidae, but canis familiaris.
just guessing: chihuahua, pug, some kind of retriever?, coursing hound?, a different courser?, no idea on the last one
a trained veterinary osteologist would do a much better job of identification.
Actually, I thought her to be an air-headed bimbo back during the impeachment days. Rather than make a point, she'd just toss her pony-tail and try to say something funny. She did provide a vacuum on the "conservative" side to counter the legal arguments of the Clinton lawyers. But she's come down a long way.
Hipsch-Klorn?
Well, if I could find a dinosaur fossil in West Virginia--say, in my back yard, I could sell it to AnswersInGenesis.org for about a million dollars. That would be a serious blow to evolution, you see, and thus proof that Genesis is literally true right down to the cubit.
do you care what type, and from what era?
would you like it hyperdetailed with C14 tags indicating bronze-age provenance? that costs extra, you know.
Helium leak rates of zircons. This is not mere postdiction, it was a published prediction:
 |
|
Figure 2. Model-predicted (red and magenta diamonds) and measured (blue dots) helium leak rates of zircons. The data fit the 6,000-year prediction very well. |
|
That is a "single Creationist prediction" that has been proven correct. Before I get a knee-jerk reference to TalkOrigins, read one of the reseachers wrote about it himself. Cordially, |
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.