Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  The judge largely succeeded in keeping the case confined to the law at issue, but he did allow Darrow a one-day Show Trial on God out of the hearing of the jury. Darrow called Bryan as his only witness and interrogated him about his personal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. The prosecution objected to the sideshow, but keeping Bryan from taking the stand would be like keeping Chuck Schumer from a microphone. For two hours, Darrow asked Bryan such questions as “Do you believe [God] made … such a fish and it was big enough to swallow Jonah?”

  The atheists had their fun with Bryan, but the jury never heard any of it, inasmuch as it was utterly irrelevant to the misdemeanor statute. The next day, Bryan was champing at the bit to call Darrow as a witness and force him to answer questions, but the prosecutors forbade it. When the jury returned, Darrow said, “We cannot even explain to you that we think you should return a verdict of not guilty. We do not see how you could. We do not ask it.” And so the jury did vote to convict Scopes on the misdemeanor offense of teaching evolution. Scopes was given a $100 fine, which Bryan offered to pay.

  The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the misdemeanor law on appeal but threw out Scopes’s conviction on a technicality. (The judge, rather than the jury, had levied the $100 fine.) Scopes called the dismissal of his conviction a “disappointment.” The ACLU again put out an offer to bring a test case challenging any evolution law, but to no avail. The antievolution laws remained on the books in half a dozen states for another forty years. Still, somehow, the republic survived.

  In other words, the movie Inherit the Wind portrays the Scopes trial about as accurately as The Flintstones portrays prehistoric man. The original play, written in 1955, was intended to be an allegory for McCarthyism. In the fifties, everything was an allegory for McCarthyism. The Crucible was an allegory for McCarthyism. Bad Day at Black Rock was an allegory for McCarthyism. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was an allegory for McCarthyism. McCarthy was an allegory for McCarthyism. For people who were living in abject terror during the McCarthy era, liberals sure churned out a lot of plays, movies, and TV shows about their victimization. When constitutional scholar Gerald Gunther went to see the Broadway play version of Inherit the Wind, he stormed out in disgust. “I ended up actually sympathizing with Bryan,” he said later, “even though I was and continue to be opposed to his ideas in the case, simply because the playwrights had drawn the character in such comic strip terms.”

  And yet this fantasy of brave liberals standing up to fascistic Christians has permeated the entire debate over evolution. Liberals act as if they have to maintain a constant vigil against the coming theocracy in America because of what happened in Inherit the Wind. But consider that this vicious portrayal of Christians was the first in-flight movie ever shown in a first-class cabin on TWA. Try to imagine a movie that portrayed Muslims as ignorant, backward brutes. Forget it—your mind hasn’t yet evolved to the point where you could even conceive of the worldwide chaotic hysteria that would follow the release of such a movie. Today, Inherit the Wind is shown in high school and junior high school science classes across the country.

  * * *

  THE only religious belief driving opinions about evolution is atheism. God can do anything, including evolution. But the value of Darwinism for atheists is that it is the only way they can explain why we are here. (It’s an accident!) If evolution doesn’t work out for them, they’ll have to expand on theories about extraterrestrials or comets bringing life to Earth. Harvard population biologist Richard Lewontin said, “[T]he tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories” of evolution and its willingness to accept “the patent absurdity of some of its constructs” flowed from the scientists’ prior commitment to materialism. Materialism is absolute, Lewontin said, “for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

  Contrary to the cult members’ description of science as requiring the exclusion of God, until the last few decades the only reason to do science was to understand God. All the real scientists believed their work was discovering God in the universe—Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, William Thomson Kelvin, George Gabriel Stokes, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli. I guess they weren’t doing real “science.”

  Louis Pasteur said that “science brings men nearer to God.” Pasteur was also, incidentally, one of Darwin’s most scathing critics, not on religious grounds but on scientific ones. The inscription over the door to Max Planck’s laboratory said, “Let no one enter here who does not have faith.”

  Sir Isaac Newton, who wrote a book about the prophecies of Daniel, said, “The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Wolfgang Pauli, called “the whip of God,” believed the greatest problem with science was “the lack of soul in the modern scientific conception of the world.” His stated objective was to find the “spirit of matter.”

  Atheists absurdly try to claim Albert Einstein as one of their own simply because he claimed not to believe in a “personal God.” I don’t know what that means beyond establishing that he was not a fundamentalist Christian, which I already knew. Einstein described his life’s work as trying to uncover God’s thoughts: “I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon. I want to know God’s thoughts—the rest are mere details.” He said he believed in a God “who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.” He famously said in a letter to Niels Bohr that “an inner voice” told him the theory of quantum mechanics “is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”

  Bohr had not kept up his Scientific American subscription so he did not know he was supposed to denounce Einstein for “filling the gaps with God.” Instead he responded, “Stop telling God what He must do!” If Eugenie Scott had ever found these letters, Bohr and Einstein would have been banned from teaching science at any high school in America.

  Evolution cultists come up with crackpot religion, no more scientific than the intergalactic ruler Xenu, and their sole claim to “science” is that they have rigorously excluded God. Liberals have harnessed the language of “science” in order to destroy science. If our goal is to keep religion out of the classroom, evolution has got to go.

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  THE APED CRUSADER

  Because though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, or thank Him, but rather became vain in their reasonings, and their heart, lacking understanding, was darkened.

  Professing to be wise, they became fools; And changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and reptiles.

  —Romans 1:21-23

  Having given up on proving evolution scientifically, now the Darwiniacs simply assert that it is true and rush ahead to their main point, which is that God does not exist. On one hand, they’re constantly proclaiming that it’s possible to believe in God and in evolution, and thereby implying that only a religious belief could keep anyone from believing in evolution. And then when no one’s looking, they announce that evolution has disproved God.

  Of course it’s possible to believe in God and in evolution. God can wind the clock, however the clock works. But that’s not the plan of the Darwiniacs. They hysterically demand that we all pretend their pseudoscience is science and then keep slipping in the fact that evolution shows that belief in God is just a biological compulsion.

  Philosophy professor and Darwiniac Daniel Dennett claims to study religion scientifically, saying, “Belief can be explained in much the way that cancer can.”’ He wonders why humans have a “craving” to believe in God. But there is no more scientific evidence for their creation story than for the Biblical creation story—probably less—so how about explaining their
“craving” to believe in natural selection? What’s that about?

  Whether they conceive of themselves as practicing “religion” as such is irrelevant. Darwiniacs have faith in some biological mutation process that dictates a consistent set of beliefs and faiths—among which is the belief that they are not practicing religion, and therefore government advancement of their beliefs is not prohibited by the Constitution.

  Compared with their fanciful story of human consciousness developing by random mutation and a bloody battle for survival, the story of Genesis is quantum physics. It’s not merely opposable thumbs and a bipedal gait that make us distinct from the other beasts. It is consciousness of our mortality, a moral sense, language, mathematics, art, beauty, music, love, longings for immortality, a sense of symmetry, the soul’s ascent, the ability to accessorize, and our fascination with Branson, Missouri—none of which make sense in Darwinian terms. Darwiniacs like Dennett avoid explaining the human soul by calling the soul an illusion. As Dennett says, “[If] mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own `real’ minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation?”

  Genesis posits a simple version of the human story: Adam and Eve are awakened to good and evil by their sin of pride, become aware of their nakedness, and stumble blinking out into the forest. However literal or metaphorical the story is, no one has improved on it in 4,000 years. No Freudian has a clearer image of man’s consciousness. We are in God’s image, and we’re the only ones in God’s image, which is why we eat escargot rather than worship them. Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe we are distinct from the beasts, you’re with God.

  The Darwiniacs’ creationism story is that man comes from an apelike ancestor and they will accept no other answer. They cling to Darwinism even as the contrary evidence accumulates, because it allows them to ignore God. Liberal secularists will not admit evolution is a crock until they have concocted a new creation myth that also excludes God.

  It used to be that Darwiniacs avoided lucid statements of the significance of their religion. That’s over. Dennett says it’s time to abandon the “taboo” against attacking religion, a taboo similar to the PLO’s taboo against attacking Israel. Toward the end of increasing attacks on religion, Dennett has written a book called Breaking the Spell, in which he describes religious belief itself as a mere biological quirk in the Darwinian process. In the same book, Dennett attacks religious belief as a malignant force. It seems the miracle mechanism of natural selection has fallen down on the job if it failed to eliminate this harmful mutation. Luckily, Darwinism is a nondisprovable pseudoscience, otherwise, it might be difficult to explain how religion can be an unfit mutation and, at the same time, has won the battle of survival. Everything proves evolution. Good traits, bad traits, inexplicable organs, a tendency to eat poison, half-off sales at Macy’s—anything that happens confirms Darwin’s theory!

  Dennett states as scientific fact that God does not answer prayers: “Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world—that’s a hopeless idea. There’s no such thing.” He optimistically refers to Darwinism as a “universal acid,” a substance “so corrosive that it will eat through anything!” Thus, he says, evolution “eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.” That’s putting it mildly, Professor. Evolution even eats through logic. According to Dennett, the universal acid of Darwinism will “dissolv[e] the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.” Science has proved it: God is dead.

  Richard Dawkins produced a two-part television series for Britain’s Channel 4 that is nothing but an all-out attack on religion, titled Root of All Evil? He compares Moses to Hitler, says religion is equivalent to child abuse, and calls the New Testament a “sadomasochistic doctrine.” In the show titled “The God Delusion,” Dawkins stands outside the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, warning his British audience of “Christian fascism” and a growing Àmerican Taliban.” (I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell.)

  While relentlessly attacking God, the Darwin cult hides behind the claim that they are merely doing “science.” The New York Times stated unequivocally in an article on evolution that science can say nothing about “why we are here or how we should live.” (That’s what the New York Times op-ed page is for!) Maybe a real science like quantum physics doesn’t speak to “why we are here or how we should live,” but evolution’s devotees pronounce on those questions all the time.

  The theory of gravity has never been invoked to justify mass murder, genocide, or eugenics. Darwin’s theory of evolution has. From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists.

  Upon first reading The Origin of Species, Darwin’s mentor from Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick, wrote a letter warning Darwin that he was “deep in the mire of folly” if he was trying to remove the idea of morality from nature. If such a separation between the physical and the moral were ever to occur, Sedgwick said, it would “sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.”’

  As Darwinism gained currency, humanity did sink into greater degradation and brutalization than any since written records of human history began. A generation later, the world would witness the rise of the eugenics movement; racial hygiene societies; the first genocide in recorded history; Nazi Germany; Stalinist gulags; and the slaughter of 70 million Chinese at the hands of their exalted chairman. To be sure, other books were published on the eve of the bloody twentieth century. But Hitler and Marx were not citing Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women for support. They were citing Darwin.

  After reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Marx dashed a note to Engels, saying, “This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views.” While Marx saw the “struggle” as among classes, Hitler conceived of the struggle as among the races. Mein Kampf means “My Struggle,” which Hitler described in unmistakably Darwinian terms.

  The path between Darwinism and Nazism may not be ineluctable, but it is more ineluctable than the evolutionary path from monkey to man. Darwin’s theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality. Instead of honor thy mother and father, the Darwinian ethic was honor thy children. Instead of enshrining moral values, the Darwinian ethic enshrined biological instincts. Instead of transcendent moral values, the Darwinian ethic said all morals are relative. Instead of sanctifying life, the Darwinian ethic sanctified death.

  So it should not be surprising that eugenicists, racists, and as-sorted psychopaths always gravitate to Darwinism. From the most evil dictators to today’s antismoking crusaders, sexual profligates, and animal rights nuts, Darwinism has infected the whole culture. And yet small schoolchildren who know that George Washington had slaves are never told of the centrality of Darwin’s theory to Nazism, eugenics, abortion, infanticide, “racial hygiene” societies, genocide, and the Soviet gulags.

  In his magnificent book From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart documents the proliferation of eugenics organizations in Germany around 1900, all of which asserted their “scientific imprimatur by claiming harmony with the laws of evolution.” Darwin’s theory was quickly and widely accepted among German biologists, a fact Darwin noted with approval, telling a friend, “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” Darwinism provided the lingo for “scientific” racism at the onset of the twentieth century.” Not only were all eugenicists Darwinists, but nearly all Darwinists were scientific racists.

  The eugenics movement wasn’t a wild, irrational perversion of Darwinism. It was a perfectly logical extension. Darwin himself believed the mentally disabled were a reversion to earlier humans—as proof, he cited the superio
r climbing skills of idiots. The very word eugenics was coined by Darwin’s half cousin, the famed eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, who conceived his ideas for selective breeding of humans after reading The Origin of Species. He hailed Darwin’s book for demolishing “dogmatic barriers” and arousing “a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities.” Galton approvingly noted that the “feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind.” But he despaired that without a program of eugenics, even the noble races were falling behind. Thus, Galton recommended forced sterilization of “unfit” humans, saying they could not be persuaded to stop breeding on their own. Eugenics, he said, “must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion.”

  Ernst Haeckel, the creative genius behind the fake embryo drawings that were cited as proof of evolution for a century, was an influential German Darwinist. Upon reading The Origin of Species, Haeckel abandoned his practice as a physician and became a leading proponent of racism and nationalism. He gleefully wrote that Darwinism had overthrown religion’s “anthropocentric fable,” which had falsely elevated man above other species. He called politics “applied biology,” a phrase later appropriated by the Nazis.

  As Haeckel saw it, a “totally different value” must be assigned to “wooly-haired Negroes” from the value assigned to “civilized Europeans.” Haeckel pronounced the “lowest” races of man “psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs)” than to white Europeans. He had phony drawings to prove that, too! In a diagram of six human and six monkey heads, he positioned the European at the beginning, farthest from the apes, and the black and aborigine right next to the apes. Like his fake embryo drawings, the inequality of human races was supposed to prove evolution by demonstrating how man might have evolved from the ape. Haeckel forthrightly stated, “The value of life of these lower wild peoples is equal to that of the anthropoid apes or stands only slightly above them.” With Haeckel’s encouragement and advice, a Dutch scientist, Bernelot Moens, tried to artificially inseminate a black woman with the sperm from an ape. Haeckel suggested a similar project, using a chimpanzee, to a German “sexologist.”