Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  Liberals are hostile to the very notion that things are a certain way and there generally isn’t much we can do about it. They want everything to be fluid, flexible, up for grabs.

  That is one reason they are so fixated on the idea of evolution. Darwin’s theory of evolution says that organisms don’t have a real essence but have “emerged” from something else and are in the process of becoming something different yet again.

  The same people who angrily waved “science” in our faces to claim that embryonic stem-cell research is more valuable than adult stem-cell research, global warming causes hurricanes, cerebral palsy is caused by noncesarean deliveries, breast implants caused autoimmune diseases, DDT caused Rachel Carson’s death, AIDS is easily transmitted by heterosexuals, and women and men have the same innate aptitude for math and science are now waving the crucifix of “science” to shut down debate on evolution. Intelligent design, they say, is not “science”—like the hard science behind heterosexual AIDS. Real science requires a belief that we all evolved from a common earthworm. No questions will be allowed.

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  THE CREATION MYTH:

  ON THE SIXTH DAY,

  GOD CREATED

  FRUIT FLIES

  Liberals’ creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It’s a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record—and that’s after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn’t still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.

  Even if evolution were true, it wouldn’t disprove God. God has performed more spectacular feats than evolution. It’s not even a daunting challenge to a belief in God. If you want something that complicates a belief in God, try coming to terms with Michael Moore being one of God’s special creatures.

  Although God believers don’t need evolution to be false, atheists need evolution to be true. William Provine, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, calls Darwinism the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. His fellow Darwin disciple, Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, famously said, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”’ This is why there is mass panic on the left whenever someone mentions the vast and accumulating evidence against evolution.

  The ACLU sued a school district in Cobb County, Georgia, merely for putting stickers in biology textbooks that urged students to study evolution “with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” According to the ACLU, an open mind violates the “separation of church and state,” which appears in the Constitution just after the abortion and sodomy clauses. In Lebec, California, parents represented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued to prevent the school from even offering an elective philosophy class on intelligent design, creationism, and evolution. In Dover, Pennsylvania, a small group of parents backed by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued to prevent any discussion of intelligent design in a ninth-grade biology class. The judge ruled in their favor and ordered the school district to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees, which will probably exceed $1 million.

  So that’s that. After Dover, no school district will dare breathe a word about “intelligent design,” unless they want to risk being bankrupted by ACLU lawsuits. The Darwinists have saved the secular sanctity of their temples: the public schools. They didn’t win on science, persuasion, or the evidence. They won the way liberals always win: by finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter.

  This isn’t science, it’s treating doubts about evolution as religious heresy. Darwinism, as philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski says, is “the last of the great 19th century mystery religions.” The only reason a lot of Christians reject evolution is that we are taught to abjure big fat lies. You can look it up—we have an entire commandment about the importance of not lying.

  Just to clean the palate of a century of evolutionists’ browbeating everyone into saying evolution is a FACT and we’ll see you in court if you criticize the official state religion, we begin with a story from the late Colin Patterson, respected paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Like Diogenes searching for one honest man, Patterson was on a quest to find someone who could tell him—as he puts it—”anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think is true.” Patterson said, “I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time.”

  Not surprisingly, the Darwiniacs, as author and columnist Joe Sobran calls them, would apparently prefer to discuss anything but evolution, since they are always pretending evolution means something utterly uncontroversial, like “change over time.” Describing “evolution” as “change over time” is like describing abortion as “choice.” Aren’t we all for “choice”? Don’t animals change over time? The boring point that organisms “change over time” is not what the Darwiniacs are teaching schoolchildren, and that’s not what the fuss is about.

  Darwin’s theory of evolution says life on Earth began with single-celled life forms, which evolved into multicelled life forms, which over countless aeons evolved into higher life forms, including man, all as the result of the chance process of random mutation followed by natural selection, without guidance or assistance from any intelligent entity like God or the Department of Agriculture. Which is to say, evolution is the eminently plausible theory that the human eye, the complete works of Shakespeare, and Ronald Reagan (among other things) all came into existence purely by accident.

  To avoid discussing the theory of evolution, Darwiniacs keep slipping irrelevant little facts into the debate like spare parts, leaving the impression that to deny evolution is to deny that the sun rises in the east. So, to be clear, by “evolution,” I mean Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

  Evolution is not selective breeding, which produces thorough-bred horses, pedigreed dogs, colored cotton, and so on. Evolution is not the capacity of bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance, but which never evolves into anything but more bacteria. Evolution is not the phenomenon of an existing species changing over the course of many years—for example, of Frenchmen becoming shorter during the Napoleonic era or Asians becoming taller after immigrating to North America. In fact, evolution is not adaptive characteristics developing within a species at all. Darwin’s theory says we get a new species, not a taller version of the same species. Evolutionists call such adaptations “microevolution” only to confuse people. This would be like the Flat Earth Society referring to the Sahara Desert as a “micro-flat Earth,” as if they are halfway to proving their theory. Well it’s flat, isn’t it?

  Evolution is not proved by genetic similarities among living things, the heritability of characteristics, or the age of the Earth. (Though the neurotic obsession of Darwiniacs to always claim their opponents must believe in a “young Earth” is so bizarre that if they raise it one more time, I’m demanding a full-fledged investigation into the Earth’s age.) Finally, one can believe evolution is not true without also believing that the Earth was created in six days by a man with a long white beard who lives in the clouds and looks eerily like Charlton Heston.

  What the theory of evolution posits is an accidental, law-of-the-jungle, survival-of-the-fittest mechanism for creating new species—as indicated in the title of Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species.

  Leave aside the thornier issues, like how the accidental process that gave us opposable thumbs could produce a moral sense and consciousness of mortality. Let’s consider just the basic steps of evolution.

  The “theory” of evolution is:

  Random mutation of desirable attributes (highly implausible)

&nbs
p; Natural selection weeding out the “less fit” animals (pointless tautology)

  Leading to the creation of new species (no evidence after 150 years of looking)

  Step One: Unless You Are a Bacterium, Random

  Mutation Can’t Produce Anything Worth Having

  With a few exceptions, the higher organisms are not going to get anything good out of a single mutation. Most of the time, it takes more than one lousy mutation to create anything really useful, like an eye or poisonous fangs or a tail. In order to get to the final product, each one of the hundreds of mutations needed to create a functional wing or ear would itself have to make the mutant animal more fit, otherwise it wouldn’t survive, according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. To the contrary, the first mutations toward a nose would just make you look funny and no one would want to reproduce with you. The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism. But evolution demands a whole parade of them that not only are individually advantageous, improving upon what existed before, but also lead to an all-new structure that is also better than what existed before.

  The evolutionist’s answer is Assume that each one of the hundreds of mutations necessary to create the final product is itself “fit” in ways we don’t understand but must accept on faith because it’s Holy Scripture. We haven’t even gotten to the second step, and evolutionists are already asking us to assume a miracle. That’s what they mean by “science, not faith.”

  In Darwin’s day, it was only seemingly simple mechanisms like gills and eyes that had to be explained—and, by the way, natural selection couldn’t explain those. Darwin knew nothing of DNA and the vastly complex systems studied by molecular biologists, such as the information processing, storage, and retrieval in DNA. Now we do. If Darwinism sounded fishy (get it?) as a means to create the eye, it’s comical as an explanation for the intricacies of the cell. This isn’t a minor gap in the theory of evolution: it is the theory of evolution. Until relatively recently, scientists didn’t know what the inside of a cell looked like.

  The cell was a mysterious “black box,” as Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe puts it. Darwiniacs prefer to ignore modern scientific knowledge so that they can pretend the cell is still a black box and tell us the mutation god created it. In his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, Behe used discoveries in microbiology to refute Darwinism on Darwin’s own terms. Darwin had set forth this extremely self-serving standard for himself: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

  This is a fantastic formulation I intend to remember in case I ever need to defend one of my own crackpot theories. On one hand, Dar-win makes what appears to be a sweeping concession that his theory might “absolutely break down.” But in the same breath, he says that will happen only if an impossible test is met: If it is demonstrated that his theory “could not possibly form” a complex organ. Would the Dar-win believers take that standard as a scientific test for God? If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by God, my God theory would absolutely break down. If only traffic court judges would fall for that line of reasoning: “Your honor, can you prove that the photo of me running the red light wasn’t staged? Oh, you can’t? I move for an immediate dismissal so I can return to my home planet, Zircon.”

  Nevertheless, Behe disproved evolution—unless evolution is simply a nondisprovable pseudoscience, like astrology. Behe produced various “irreducibly complex” mechanisms, of which there are thousands—complex cellular structures, blood-clotting mechanisms, and the eye, among others. A bacterial motor, called a flagellum, depends on the coordinated interaction of 30–40 complex protein parts. The absence of almost any one of the parts would render the flagellum useless. An animal cell’s whiplike oar, called a cilium, is composed of about 200 protein parts. Behe compared these cell parts to a simple mousetrap, with far fewer necessary components than a cilium or flagellum. Though there are only a few parts to a mousetrap, all of them have to be working together at one time for the contraption to serve any function whatsoever. If one of the parts is missing, Behe says, you don’t get a mousetrap that catches only half as many mice: you don’t get a mousetrap at all. Behe then demonstrated that it is a mathematical impossi-bility for all 30 parts of the flagellum (or 200 parts of the cilium) to have been brought together by the “numerous, successive, slight modifications” of natural selection. Life at the molecular level, he concluded, “is a loud, clear, piercing cry of design.”

  Although clearly annoyed with him, many evolutionists were forced to concede Behe’s point. Evolutionary biologist Tom Cavalier-Smith, at the University of British Columbia, said, “For none of the cases mentioned by Behe is there yet a comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of the observed complexity.” Yale molecular biologist Robert Dorit said, “In a narrow sense, Behe is correct when he argues that we do not yet fully understand the evolution of the flagellar motor or the blood clotting cascade.” But still they believed that evolution must be true. They’ll figure out how to prove it eventually.

  But most of the cult reacted to Behe’s argument the way feminists do to the suggestion that men and women might possibly have different aptitudes for math and science—they got nasty, they cried, and they denied that anything had been proved. Darwin fundamentalist Richard Dawkins denounced Behe as “cowardly” for believing in God—before admitting he couldn’t answer Behe’s argument.

  You will begin to notice that the Darwiniacs’ answer to everything is to accuse their opponents of believing in God—and a flat Earth for good measure—even when responding to an argument based on biochemistry, physics, or mathematics.

  Jerry Coyne, evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, said of Behe’s cell structures, “There is no doubt that the pathways described by Behe are dauntingly complex, and their evolution will be hard to unravel… . [W]e may forever be unable to envisage the first proto-pathways.” Or it could take hundreds of billions of years! But by then, maybe we’ll have evolved into a species that doesn’t exhibit anti-religious hysteria whenever anyone questions the theory of evolution. After having had several years to work on unraveling the complexity, Coyne wrote a 13,000-word jeremiad in the October 2005 New Republic magazine denouncing proponents of intelligent design as creationist nuts. But, curiously, Coyne never got around to addressing Behe’s argument for intelligent design—the centerpiece of the very subject Coyne claimed to be discussing.’

  Coyne simply asserted that it was possible for irreducibly complex mechanisms to have arisen by natural selection. “We have realized for decades that natural selection can indeed produce systems that, over time, become integrated to the point where they appear to be irreducibly complex.” If it can, there is no evidence that it can.

  Evolutionist Robert Pennock said of Behe’s evidence, “I have not addressed the biochemical details of his real examples, but as we have noted, the evidence is not yet in on those questions.” The evidence isn’t in? According to Behe, many of the biochemical systems he cited “have been well understood for 40 years.” Much like George Bush’s alleged draft dodging, there are only two possible answers from the Darwiniacs: Either evolution is true or more research is needed.

  The “science” writer for the Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley, be-gins her attack on Behe’s argument by, in effect, confirming Larry Summers’s point about women lacking aptitude for the hard sciences. Begley says, “Even before Darwin, critics attacked the idea of biological evolution with one or another version of, Èvolve this!’ Whether they invoked a human, an eye, or the cell’s flagella that propel bacteria and sperm, the contention that natural processes of mutation and natural selection cannot explain the complexity of living things has been alive and well for 200 years.”

  First, no one was attacking the “idea of biological evolution”
be-fore Darwin because there wasn’t a lot to attack. “Evolution” before Darwin was just a teleological claim about the chain of life, having nothing to do with natural selection, which was Darwin’s contribution to the subject. Indeed, before Darwin, the accepted explanation for the chain of life was design.

  Second, no one knew precisely what the flagellum was until around the late 1960s, when the flagellum was first discovered to be the bacterial cell’s tiny little outboard motor. So it would be difficult to make an argument for or against any particular method of the flagellum’s creation when no one knew what the flagellum was or what it did.

  Third, the fact that the eye has been cited as an argument against natural selection for 200 years is true, but this is hardly an argument in favor of evolution. Despite having 200 years to work on it, evolutionists still don’t have an answer.

  Darwin himself noted the difficulty of explaining the eye in The Origin of Species, admitting he could not do it—which science reporter Begley might have mentioned. Darwin hypothesized that the eye might have begun as a patch of light-sensitive cells upon which natural selection could then work its magic, making gradual improvements—creating an eye socket and slowly increasing focus and perspective and so on—until these special cells became light-sensitive pits and then a full-fledged eye. Apart from the fact that his explanation explained nothing—like all evolutionary myths, it was just a story about how something might have happened—even Darwin didn’t have a story for where these amazing “light-sensitive cells” came from. That’s the big enchilada.

  Darwin catapulted over the whole problem to be solved by beginning his thought experiment at a point after the major characteristic to be evolved—light-sensitive cells—already existed. For light-sensitive cells to work, the cells would have to have the capacity to initiate an electric signal, a nerve capable of carrying the electric signal to a brain, and a brain capable of processing the signal and using it to emit other electric signals.