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CHAPTER 1
ANN COULTER TAKES ON DARWIN
Ann Coulter has made a fortune by writing books that viciously insult liberals, by defending her ultra-conservative views on television talk shows, and by traveling the country giving barbed lectures. A friend recently described her with one word: cobra.
I never took Ann seriously until I read her fifth book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. I wanted to find out what she had to say about evolution and intelligent design. My review of her new role as science writer first appeared in The Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2008).
Ann Coulter is an attractive writer with green eyes and lopsidedly cut long blond hair, whose trademark is insulting liberals with remarks so outrageous that they make Rush Limbaugh sound like a Sunday school teacher. This is one reason why all six of her books have made The New York Times bestseller list and earned her fame and fortune.
Coulter's fifth book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, has just been issued in paperback to provide an excuse for this review. Here are some of the book's mean, below-the-belt punches:
Monica Lewinski is a "fat Jewish girl" (p. 4).
Julia Roberts and George Clooney are "airheads" (p. 8).
Ted Kennedy is "Senator Drunkennedy" (p. 90).
The four Jersey "weeping widows" (p. 289) of men who died in the September 11 attacks are "rabid" (p. 103), "self-obsessed" (p. 103), and "harpies" (p. 112). "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much" (p. 103).
Diplomat Joseph Wilson, whose wife was outed from the CIA, is a "nut and liar" (p. 119) and a "pompous jerk" (p. 121). He is likened to a "crazy aunt up in the attic" (p. 295).
Cindy Sheehan, the vocal war protester, is a "poor imbecile" (p. 102) with an "itsy-bitsy, squeaky voice" (p. 103).
Katie Couric is a "shopworn sweetheart" (p. 295).
Liberals are repeatedly called pathetic nuts and crackpots. "[They] are more upset when a tree is chopped down than when a child is aborted" (p. 5). Apparently Coulter expects God to send most liberals to hell, because she writes, "I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven" (p. 22).
Coulter has nothing good to say about any Democrat. They are all crazy liberals who are socialists in disguise. Her latest book is titled If Democrats Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans. Here are a few other folks who get pummeled in Godless:
All defenders of abortion.
All defenders of gay marriages and those who think homosexuality is genetic.
"Hysterical" and "ugly" feminists.
Scientists who deny there could be subtle differences between the mental abilities of men and women and between different races.
College professors who teach students to hate God and America.
Opponents of capital punishment.
Scientists who fear global warming.
Scientists who were once afraid that AIDS would spread to heterosexuals.
Educators who want to teach small children how to use condoms and engage in oral and anal sex.
Opponents of nuclear power.
The staff of The New York Times.
Those who favor embryonic stem-cell research.
Senator John Edwards. Coulter has never apologized for slandering him. Speaking at a political action conference she called Edwards a "faggot" (falsely, of course). (See Wikipedia's article on Coulter for shameful details.)
And so on.
In the last four chapters of Godless, Coulter suddenly morphs into a science writer. The chapters are blistering attacks on Darwinian evolution — the notion that life evolved gradually from simple, one-celled forms to humans by a process that consisted of random mutations combined with the survival of the fittest. Darwin of course knew nothing about mutations, but Coulter is concerned with modern Darwinism, which she is convinced requires some sort of superior intelligence to guide evolution.
In brief, Coulter is a dedicated believer in intelligent design, or ID for short. Among promoters of ID, mathematician and Baptist William Dembski and Catholic Michael Behe are Coulter's main heroes. Dembski, who has a degree in divinity from the Princeton Theological Seminary, was Coulter's principal adviser on the last four chapters.
Like all IDers, nowhere does Coulter hint at how God, or a pantheistic sort of intelligence, guided evolution. There are two leading possibilities:
1. God manipulated mutations so that new species arose, culminating finally in humans.
2. God may have allowed mutations and survival of the fittest to produce different breeds of a species, such as dogs and cats, but new species were created out of whole cloth, just as it says in the Book of Genesis. Like Behe and other IDers, Coulter is silent on how God directed evolution and what sort of evidence would confirm or disconfirm the role of an intelligent designer.
This is not the place to defend in detail what Coulter likes to call the "Darwinocranks." It has been admirably done in scores of books by top scientists, all of whom Coulter considers cranks. Peter Olofson, writing tongue in cheek on "The Coulter Hoax" in the Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2007), accuses Coulter of perpetrating a brilliant satire of ID rhetoric.
Let me focus instead on the transition from apelike mammals to humans. Coulter repeatedly accuses the Darwinocranks of being embarrassed by a lack of fossils that show transitional forms from one species to another. Such paucity is easily explained by the rarity of conditions for fossilization and by the fact that transitional forms can evolve rapidly. (By "rapidly" geologists mean tens of thousands of years.) Moreover, transitional fossils keep piling up as the search for them continues.
Nowhere are transitional forms more abundant than in the fossils of early human skeletons and the skeletons of their apelike ancestors. Consider the hundreds of fossils of Neanderthals. H. G. Wells, in a forgotten little book titled Mr. Belloc Objects (see chapter 4 of this book), defends evolution against ignorant attacks by the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc. In chapter 4 of his book, Wells has this to say about Neanderthals:
When I heard that Mr. Belloc was going to explain and answer the Outline of History, my thought went at once to this creature. What would Mr. Belloc say of it? Would he put it before or after the Fall? Would he correct its anatomy by wonderful new science out of his safe? Would he treat it like a brother and say it held by the most exalted monotheism, or treat it as a monster made to mislead wicked men?
He says nothing! He just walks away whenever it comes near him.
But I am sure it does not leave him. In the night, if not by day, it must be asking him: "Have I a soul to save, Mr. Belloc? Is that Heidelberg jawbone one of us, Mr. Belloc, or not? You've forgotten me, Mr. Belloc. For four-fifths of the Paleolithic age I was 'man.' There was no other. I shamble and I cannot walk erect and look up at heaven as you do, Mr. Belloc, but dare you cast me to the dogs?"
No reply.
Coulter is as silent as Mr. Belloc about Neanderthals and about the even earlier, more apelike skeletons. I doubt if they trouble her sleep; I doubt if anything troubles Coulter's sleep. Does she think there was a slow, incremental transition from apelike creatures to Cro-Magnons and other humans? Or does she believe there was a first pair of humans?
Let's assume there was a first pair. Does Coulter think God created Adam out of the dust of the earth, as Genesis describes, then fabricated Eve from one of Adam's ribs? Or does she accept the fact that the first humans were the outcome of slow, small changes over many centuries? If the transition was sudden, then Adam and Eve were raised and suckled by a mother who was a soulless beast!
This is a bothersome dilemma for all Christians who believe in the crossing of a sharp line from beast to human. It is a dilemma about which I once wrote a short story called "The Horrible Horns." If interested, you can find it in my book The No-Sided Professor and Other Tales of Fantasy, Humor, Mystery, and Philosophy.
We know from a footnote on page 3 of Godless that Coulter considers herself a Christian. But what sort of Christian? The word has become enormously vague. Today one can call oneself a Christian and hold beliefs that range from the fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, through the liberal views of mainline Protestant ministers and Catholic liberals such as Hans Kung and Gary Wills, to the atheism of Paul Tillich. Tillich did not believe in a personal God or an afterlife, two of the central doctrines of Christ's teachings, yet he is considered by many Protestants to be one of the world's greatest Christian theologians!
Wikipedia's article on Coulter quotes her as saying, "Christ died for my sins ... Christianity fuels everything I write." This sounds like something an evangelical Protestant would say. On the other hand, in Godless Coulter quotes a remark by G. K. Chesterton (p. 10), who is almost never quoted today except by Catholics. Is Coulter a Protestant or a Catholic? Or some other kind of Christian?
Although I am not a Catholic, allow me to cite a famous passage from Chesterton's introduction to his book Heretics:
But there are some people, nevertheless — and I am one of them — who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.
Coulter, you are merciless in bashing liberals and atheists, so please let us know what church you attend. It would clear the air and shed light on your peculiar personality and on the background for all your insults, especially your blasts at Darwinians.
Here's another simple question to ponder: Why do you suppose God provided men with nipples?
CHAPTER 2
ISAAC NEWTON'S VAST OCEAN OF TRUTH
There are two reasons for viewing Newton's career as awesome: his stupendous discoveries in mathematics and physics, and the equally stupendous stupidity of his theology. My review of Peter Ackroyd's Newton (2008) appeared in The New Criterion (April 2008). For more of my opinions about Newton, see my article "Isaac Newton: Alchemist and Fundamentalist" in The Skeptical Inquirer (September/October 1996), reprinted in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? (New York: Norton, 2000).
Peter Ackroyd is an acclaimed and prolific British novelist, poet, dramatist, and biographer. He has written biographies of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Thomas More, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. His history of London was a bestseller. His new biography of Isaac Newton follows the lives of Geoffrey Chaucer and J.M.W. Turner.
There has been a raft of recent biographies of Newton, notably Richard Westfall's Never at Rest. Why another one? The answer is that a brief life of Newton meets a widespread need. Longer biographies may tell you more about a person than you care to know. Although there are no new or startling revelations in Ackroyd's book, its facts are accurate, his judgments sound, and his writing a great pleasure to read.
Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was a strange, improbable blend of a great mathematician and physicist, one of history's greatest, with the mind-set of an ignorant, naive fundamentalist. A practicing Anglican, he never doubted that God created the entire universe in six literal days, that He once drowned every human and beast except for Noah and his companions, that Eve was fabricated from Adam's rib, that Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt, that Moses parted the Red Sea, and that the prophecies of Daniel and the Book of Revelation came straight from the Almighty and are certain to be fulfilled.
Newton tried to calculate the exact date of Jesus's return to earth. He set a precise year for the creation that was half a century later than Bishop Ussher's famous 4004 B.C.E. He was convinced that the Catholic Church was the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. After his death, Ackroyd tells us, Newton left a manuscript on biblical prophecy that ran to 850 pages.
Newton's single great departure from Anglican orthodoxy was his opposition to the Trinity. Jesus was indeed the Son of God, but he was not Jehovah. "We should not pray to two Gods," Newton wrote. The notion that Jesus was God in human flesh was a heresy perpetuated by Rome. Newton carefully concealed his anti-trinitarianism to avoid being expelled from Cambridge University where for decades he was a professor, ironically at Trinity College.
Another aspect of Newton's curious, complicated life was his obsession with alchemy. He owned and studied all the books on alchemy he could obtain, and spent endless days in his laboratory trying vainly to turn base metals into gold. His unpublished writings on alchemy, though smaller than his writings on Bible prophecy, ran to more than a million words, far exceeding everything he wrote about physics and astronomy. Ackroyd cites John Maynard Keynes's celebrated Cambridge lecture on Newton's secret records about alchemy. He found nothing of the slightest value to science.
Late in life, Newton suffered a mental breakdown that lasted more than a year. It has been suggested it was the result of poisoning by the mercury he used in his alchemical experiments. Others believe Newton was the victim of a bipolar disorder that triggered a deep depression.
It is hard now to comprehend, but only a small fraction of Newton's long life was devoted to investigating God's laws of nature. In a few years of his mid-twenties he invented calculus, found that white light was a mixture of all colors, explained for the first time the rainbow, and constructed one of the earliest reflecting telescopes. His greatest discovery, of course, was that gravity, which holds us to the earth and makes apples fall, is the same force that guides the path of our moon, our sister planets, and our comets. What else might he have discovered had he not squandered his energy and talents on alchemy and Biblical exegesis!
Gravity, Newton wrongly believed, acts instantaneously at a distance. Its nature remained a total mystery. Newton knew its force varied directly with the product of two masses, and inversely with the square of the distance between them, but its cause, he said, "I do not pretend to understand." Not until Einstein was it partly explained by the curvature of space-time.
Light, Newton believed, was corpuscular, composed of minute particles. In this he was half right. Today, light is known to be both a particle and a wave.
Ackroyd is good in describing Newton's complex personality, which is almost as bizarre as his beliefs. In Ackroyd's words he was "suspicious and secretive," with "a great capacity for anger and aggression." There are records of him smiling, only one of him laughing. It occurred when someone asked him what is the value of studying Euclid.
In his younger years, Newton often slept in his clothing. Even when not absorbed by work he would go without eating or eat standing up. He never exercised or had any hobbies. Going out, he frequently forgot to comb his hair or fasten his stockings. In his elderly years, when he was Warden of the Royal Mint, he was ruthless in seeing that counterfeiters were hanged.
Newton had almost no interest in art, music, literature, or women. Here is his account of his only attendance at an opera. "The first act I heard with pleasure, the second stretched my patience, at the third I ran away." He once dismissed poetry as "ingenious fiddle-faddle."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish"
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Copyright © 2009 Martin Gardner.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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