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Review of Godless -- (Centers on Evolution)
Powells Review a Day ^ | August 10, 2006 | Jerry Coyne

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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Unclassified
KEYWORDS: anncoulter; anothercrevothread; bookreview; coulter; crevolist; enoughalready; genesis1; irreligiousleft; jerklist; pavlovian; thewordistruth
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To: publius1

ID wants to focus on the "why" of nature and how it fits into God's plan for us.

Biologists want to understand what's going on around us in a simple non-metaphysical way.


301 posted on 08/18/2006 12:03:49 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: Quark2005
"These are all examples of negatives."

Radio-isotope halos and Diamond Crystal studies aren't negative. Creationists went looking specifically looking for "clocks" that would measure through different means than radiometric decay.

The magnetic flips, wasn't negative. The Creationist specifically theorized and predicted that lava cooling would have captured the record of quick magnetic flips.

The vestigal organs can be stated as a positive. That all human organs would serve important functions.

The missing links is a negative, but it's a pretty damning negative for evolution.

"Non-coding DNA having function" is a positive.

302 posted on 08/18/2006 12:03:58 PM PDT by DannyTN
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To: publius1
What's far more disturbing than Coulter herself...

Someone's going to get a can of whoop-a$$ opened on him.

303 posted on 08/18/2006 12:05:16 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: Loud Mime
"Stalin was a Darwinist.

Not really. Darwinism does not fit in well with Marxist philosophy. Marxism requires the populace to be socially malleable, Darwinism states that humans have a large unmalleable, evolutionarily inherited, central mental core. Stalin would be better described as a Lamarckian.

"Hitler, who believed in a master race, was...what?"

Hitler was a fruitcake that was full of hate and would have latched on to anything he felt had the slightest possibility of justifying his actions.

304 posted on 08/18/2006 12:08:09 PM PDT by b_sharp (Why bother with a tagline? Even they eventually wear out! (Second Law of Taglines))
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To: King Prout
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. a trained veterinary osteologist would do a much better job of identification.

That's basically my point. We know these are canine skulls because we are familiar with them. Similarly, a verterinary osteologist would be able to place them immediately because he's seen thousands of them--along with their original owners.

We don't have that luxury with the fossil record which covers at least 4 billion years. Tales of incorrect interpretations of the fossils are legion and updated almost daily.

Don't assume that I think we shouldn't study the fossil record--quite the contrary I find it fasciniating and I read about each new discovery with great interest. However, I'm cautious enough to realize that something paleontologists are absolutely certain right now might get thrown out the window in 20 years. We're just scratching the surface, really.
305 posted on 08/18/2006 12:09:31 PM PDT by Antoninus (Public schools are the madrassas of the American Left. --Ann Coulter, Godless)
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To: Dimensio
All of these accusations are founded in a premise that her claims are demonstratably false, and ample information has been provided as evidence that her claims are false.

Please give one example, Dimensio!

306 posted on 08/18/2006 12:13:02 PM PDT by betty boop (Character is destiny. -- Heraclitus)
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To: VadeRetro
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.

I guess that must mean I'm stupid, too -- because I remain unconvinced by your arguments.

In any case, I never said the Second Law of Themodynamics means that evolution is impossible. I also never said that I hold evolution theory to be false. All I have ever said in that regard is that the neo-Darwinist version both claims more than it can justify, and is incomplete.

307 posted on 08/18/2006 12:16:52 PM PDT by betty boop (Character is destiny. -- Heraclitus)
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To: Antoninus

I'm reasonably comfortable with the analyses done by experts in the field. I'm not particularly pleased with the occasional uber-extrapolation from one chunk of occipital bone into a fully-fleshed organism, nay! tribe, etc... but those are exceptions to the rule.

while not an osteologist, I do have some familiarity with the standards of the trade, and know that they are carefully measuring and comparing hundreds of specific and interrelated "landmark" features, not simply eyeballing them and making grand pronouncements - that latter's the Scientific Creationist's method, not the scientist's.


308 posted on 08/18/2006 12:17:20 PM PDT by King Prout (many complain I am overly literal... this would not be a problem if fewer people were under-precise)
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To: spatso

Amos preached in a time of plenty and comfort. There was no recognition among the people that they needed the Lord.
Those in our culture who luxuriate in their comfort do not want to be bothered with loathsome enemies like Marxism, Islamofascism and the illicit spawn of Humanism.
When science seeks to create a moral climate it is beyond its limits.
And, you are correct, when religious professionals make diatribe against reason and legitimate scientific enterprise they are no better than a Taliban.


309 posted on 08/18/2006 12:17:48 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell (Here come I, gravitas in tow.)
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To: Antoninus
Those look like crocodylians. But with the 250 million year history of that order, it's impossible to ID them without being able to handle them or look them up.

There are 23 current species and 100's of extinct ones, more if you include similar looking species from the diapsida sub-group.

I'm not sure what your point is.

310 posted on 08/18/2006 12:18:30 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: betty boop

such has been done, repeatedly.
do you pledge to pay attention, or shall we simply put out once more in hope that has thus far gone unrequited?


311 posted on 08/18/2006 12:18:36 PM PDT by King Prout (many complain I am overly literal... this would not be a problem if fewer people were under-precise)
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To: pgyanke
"If you read his "work" again you will see that he attempts to equate all religions, including Christianity, in his blood liable. I was simply showing that if he wants to talk religious bloodshed, not all religions are equal."

I agree.

My point is that attributing horrific habits to a specific group during a debate about science is nonsensical. Humans, whether atheistic or religious have in the past and will continue to kill other humans based on any number of closely held and probably erroneous reasons.

I would prefer that the argument between Evolution and Creation avoid such obviously pointless arguments.

In my opinion, comparing numbers of deaths devalues the lives of all who died.

312 posted on 08/18/2006 12:22:25 PM PDT by b_sharp (Why bother with a tagline? Even they eventually wear out! (Second Law of Taglines))
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To: Diamond; freedumb2003
You're misrepresenting the talkorigins write-up. The data in this case were fabricated to match the prediction.

A better example would have been a cosmological one. The Bible documents a creation event that is now accepted in the "big bang" theory. The previous steady-state theory is now discredited and no longer studied.

313 posted on 08/18/2006 12:23:00 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: King Prout
while not an osteologist, I do have some familiarity with the standards of the trade, and know that they are carefully measuring and comparing hundreds of specific and interrelated "landmark" features, not simply eyeballing them and making grand pronouncements - that latter's the Scientific Creationist's method, not the scientist's.

Perhaps. But comparing hundreds of interrelated features is still speculation when it comes do determining if two fossilized skulls were actually of the same species/genus/family/class etc. If we could genetically compare them somehow, THAT would be proof. I believe that we someday we will develop the technology to do so, thus putting a lot of this stuff to rest.
314 posted on 08/18/2006 12:23:12 PM PDT by Antoninus (Public schools are the madrassas of the American Left. --Ann Coulter, Godless)
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To: <1/1,000,000th%

His point, apparently, is that paleontologists aren't allowed to use source materials or their education to identify skull and bone samples. I think it's found under section 2, subsection b (iv) of the Paleontologist Rulebook -- which reads -- "With each find, a working paleontologist in the field must forget all prior knowledge and eschew all reference materials, make a wild-ass guess at what he's holding in his hand, and avoid at all costs any further examination of the find after a shower and a shave."


315 posted on 08/18/2006 12:30:24 PM PDT by atlaw
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To: LtKerst
"The transitional articles you post are all Biased, and un-scientific.

"it is creation that is supported By the phisical world.

"there are exactly Zero, transitional Fosils.

"Archeopterix was just a Bird.

"Evolutionists are afraid of the truth.

"They, like Satan want to be GOD.

Wow! Now *that* was an amazingly convincing, concise, scientifically sound and unbiased refutation.

316 posted on 08/18/2006 12:30:46 PM PDT by b_sharp (Why bother with a tagline? Even they eventually wear out! (Second Law of Taglines))
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To: <1/1,000,000th%
Those look like crocodylians.

One is, one ain't. The one that ain't is Eryops, a giant amphibian which existed about 300 million years ago. The other one is of a modern caiman.

My point is, it's relatively easy to misidentify two fossils that very far divergent--even when we have full skulls or skeletons (which is the exception, not the norm). Granted, a trained paleontologist is going to be a lot better at it than you or I, but they're still prone to mistakes and have made many of them over the past century.
317 posted on 08/18/2006 12:33:42 PM PDT by Antoninus (Public schools are the madrassas of the American Left. --Ann Coulter, Godless)
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To: atlaw
His point, apparently, is that paleontologists aren't allowed to use source materials or their education to identify skull and bone samples. I think it's found under section 2, subsection b (iv) of the Paleontologist Rulebook -- which reads -- "With each find, a working paleontologist in the field must forget all prior knowledge and eschew all reference materials, make a wild-ass guess at what he's holding in his hand, and avoid at all costs any further examination of the find after a shower and a shave."

Uh, my belief is that the ToE offers the best explanation for speciation we currently have. Snide comments like this are exactly what makes me think that there may be more political/religious fervor behind the pro-Darwinian side of the argument than the young Earth Creationist side. And that's saying something!
318 posted on 08/18/2006 12:36:47 PM PDT by Antoninus (Public schools are the madrassas of the American Left. --Ann Coulter, Godless)
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To: Doctor Stochastic
My mistake ... I was thinking of Harmon-Kardon.
319 posted on 08/18/2006 12:38:05 PM PDT by Gumlegs
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To: Antoninus
Sorry. That was pretty snide on my part. But it was also kind of tough to see the point.
320 posted on 08/18/2006 12:41:06 PM PDT by atlaw
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