A few more comments on Godless

Well, I'm a bit late on getting to this one, but since I've been on back shifts for seven days straight now and have been also trying to follow the World Cup, maybe it's understandable. Regardless, I hadn't quite realized that just about four full chapters of Godless, Ann Coulter's god-awful conservative-pandering book, deal with evolution. Over at Pharyngula, PZ Meyers has a couple of excellent posts here and here that deal with the book, and probably more are forthcoming.

The first deals with the general claim of these chapters, the notion that there's no evidence for evolution, using a style that essentially amounts to the repetition of virtually every Creationist canard in the book (this link, by the way, is at the top of my bookmarks and should be at the top of yours; a fabulous resource for debunking nearly every claim the Creationists spew). In Meyer's first post, he posts an enormous list of resources to point to for evidence for evolution, and hits a perfect line with his money shot:

Now look: I've been telling you all about how you, with negligible effort, can find buckets of evidence for evolution. I haven't actually recited any of that evidence yet, and that's because I and many other biologists have been telling everyone about that evidence for years: there comes a point where you have to recognize that the other side has simply put their hands over their ears and are shouting "LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA" at the top of their lungs.

This is something I've noticed for a long time, ever since I moved to an area that surrounded myself with people that by and large believe that the Earth is only 6,000 or so years old. These people just don't care about evidence; they usually don't even know what evidence is. Rubes like Kent Hovind come down here and speak and the public just eats it up (yes, I refuse to link to his real site and instead link to a site analyzing his lunacy). These are the core constituents of the Creationist crowd: the people that start from the conclusion (God made the world roughly 6,000 years ago and on the 6th day made Adam and Eve) and work their way backwards for anything that might be able to be passed off as evidence.

The new mutation of Creationism, Intelligent Design, is a political ploy and nothing more, and I think most of the educated Creationists know it. As the Dover Trial so skillfully illustrated, the people pushing for the teaching of Intelligent design are activists that want to find a way to get Jesus into the the public school classroom, and who always seem to begin life by openly talking about this as their goal. Only when they look into a case like Edwards v. Aguillard and realize that that approach has been deemed unconstitutional does "Intelligent Design" ever enter the building. (This is the approach that the Creationists used in authoring their textbook, Of Pandas and People as well; begin life as a Creationist text and then systematically erase all direct references to God and Creationism, replacing them with "The Intelligent Designer" and "Intelligent Design", so as to attempt to circumvent the First Amendment). A cursory glance at the Wedge Document, an internal Discovery Institute memo, reveals they don't fight evolution because they want to advance scientific understanding of life, but because they view "scientific materialsm" as tantamount to atheism and feel that "the cultural legacies of materialsm have been devastating". Their target is not evolution per se, but scientific thought in general - the notion of looking for answers that don't involve God scares the crap out of these people. Evolution is just the branch of science that they feel is the most vulnerable, and thus it becomes the target for the sharp edge of the wedge.

With all that in mind, Meyers's second post deals more with the specific attacks that Coulter makes on biologists and biology as a scientific discipline. The attacks are of course pure nonsense, and Meyers unloads with a pure diamond:

If Coulter ever gets cancer or the flu or needs surgery, I think she should insist on a doctor with no training in biology. Understanding cell biology or physiology are such useless bits of knowledge, don't you know.

Now, to bring these points together, I think any rational person can probably agree that the Discovery Institute and their ilk of direct "Intelligent Design" proponents pretty much consist solely of Christian religious fanatics that are pushing for Jesus to be in every aspect of our lives and are willing to lie about their motives to get past the first amendment. That's easy enough to see. Witness the Wedge Document.

But Coulter seems to be of a slightly different gestalt. I don't really buy her as a Jesus freak - when she comes onto talk shows she doesn't ever really talk about God so much as she bitches about "liberals", and if you have ever dealt with Jesus freaks, you know that the one thing they cannot stop talking about is their religion. Additionally, in the general sense, she seems a bit too quick on the draw to be dismissed as an idiot that actually might buy into this bullshit. After all, as already discussed, she's a bit more liberal in her lifestyle than she preaches, and is open about it - she's been quoted as saying:

Let's say I go out every night and meet a guy and have sex with him. Good for me. I'm single.

Hardly something you'd expect to hear from a true Jesus freak, although admittedly I don't have a context for the quote and it is the sort of thing that could be taken out of context.

In reality, I think, she's of a third mutation on the Creationist scale, which starts at Kent Hovind (Ignorance for Jesus), escalates to William Demski (Lying for Jesus), and progresses up to Ann Coulter (Repeating Lies Made By Liars for Jesus, for Profit).

She's preaching to the choir and knows it, and whether or not she actually means any of the bullshit she's spewing is mostly irrelevant - she knows that the fanatic-fundie base will eat this crap up and make her more money. In that she is a shrewd businesswoman, and there can be no doubt whatsoever that she is a very skilled self-promoter. The fact that she manages to include virtually every Creationist canard ever repeated lends me to the thinking that she knows she's spewing bullshit, but also knows there's massive profit to be made in so doing. In short, she's pandering to the ignorant, and that's about all there is to say about that.