Unlike most reviewers here panning the book, I actually read Ann Coulter's Godless in its entirety and enjoyed it very much. I even liked the outrageous humor. Sure, she goes over the top at times, maybe even tastelessly so. But in a country where adult ADD is on the rise and over-stimulation and hyper-hype are the norm in just about everything, maybe this is the only way she can get her point home (as argued here: [...] It's a little like shouting to be heard when everybody else is shouting.
The problem for Coulter, though, ironically, is that by succumbing to temptations to give the groundlings in her audience some base humor, she gives her critics an opportunity to avoid addressing her arguments substantively. I can hear her counter: the liberals don't want to respond with reason and logic to argument, anyway. To judge by most of the "reviews" here, I'd have to say she's right. But c'mon, Coulter exaggerates. Surely somewhere in here there must be somebody who takes her soberly to task.
For me, the most brilliant chapters of Godless are her deconstructions of Darwinism and its zealous, almost frenzied advocates. Though I am not ready to jump into bed with the creationists yet, Coulter does a good job of pointing out that both the Book of Genesis and Darwin's theory on the origin of species require great leaps of faith, and such objective scientific evidence that exists (such as the vast fossil record) is completely devoid of any proof of Darwin's hope that species evolve from one to another in a gradual, slow and completely random way. The proof, such as it is (i.e. the Cambrian and now - since the 1984 China discoveries - the pre-Cambrian fossil record) tends to prove just the opposite: that all currently living phyla descend from plants and animals that burst on the scene suddenly, with no visible precursors. And previously believed "missing links" (such as the "Piltdown Man" - a hoax) between man and monkey have evaporated over time, one by one. Darwinism may be right. Too bad there's no proof for it.
As good as it is on the subject of Darwin's theory of evolution, Godless missed two morsels of Darwinania (neologism á la "Drunkennedy" Coulter uses for You Know Who) which she overlooked:
1. Darwin on Darwin:
"...Darwin was hopelessly divided on the question of the role of humanity in the universe. Although he is credited as the one who dethroned humanity from the center of the biological universe, he confessed in his autobiography concerning ' the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.' He confided to a friend, 'My theology is simply a muddle.'" from Parallel Worlds (paperback), Michio Kaku, First Anchor Books Edition February 2006, New York; p. 344.
So even though Coulter argues that liberals claim Darwin as their own Prophet of Godlessness, you really can't call Darwin a liberal. Would liberals ever admit to such self-doubt, or that their "theology is simply a muddle"?
2. Alfred Russel Wallace
Most people assume Darwin gets all the credit for coming up with the "discovery" of natural selection. But in the mid-1800s, Darwin and the English biologist Alfred Russel (yes, just one "l") Wallace independently came up with the idea. But unlike Darwin, Wallace concluded early on what an increasing number of biologists with integrity now see as plain common sense:
"But in [stating that the mind needed evolution just as much as the body, Darwin] was deserted by many of his supporters, the psychologist William James being a notable exception. Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, the co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, argued that the human mind was too complex to be the product of natural selection. It must instead be a supernatural creation...Wallace was remarkable for his time in being mostly devoid of racial prejudice. He had lived among natives of South America and southeast Asia, and he thought of them as equals, morally if not always intellectually. This led him to the belief that all races of humanity had similar mental abilities, which puzzled him because it implied that in most `primitive' societies, the great part of human intelligence went unused. What was the point of being able to read or do long division if you were going to spend all your life in a tropical jungle? Ergo, said Wallace, `some higher intelligence directed the process by which the human race was developed.'" The Agile Gene (paperback), Matt Ridley, Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (July 6, 2004), p. 10; this paragraph followed by footnote 5: "Quoted in Degler, C.N. 1991. In Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press."
So it looks like there was a schism in the Darwiniac papacy right from the get-go. Maybe Wallace lost out because he didn't have the right kind of publicist the trust-fund wealthy Darwin could afford (perhaps Darwin was a liberal, after all). But clearly, serious scientific endorsement of "intelligent design" is as old as - well, Darwin.
By the way, Matt Ridley, author of The Agile Gene just quoted above, is one of those risk-avoidance academics Ann Coulter writes about. He recognizes genes act more like complex algorithms in even more vastly complex logic sequences (so that "the same gene" in mice, chickens or humans is involved in completely different kinds of biological activities, just as a piano played by Elton John sounds different from "the same piano" played by Murray Pariah). Genes are not Legos blocks, but switches that get turned on or off over carefully orchestrated time sequences, in concert with millions of other sequenced off-and-on switchings of some 30,000 other active genes in humans. That is one helluva piano, capable of infinite kinds of music. But in accounting for these "design" phenomena Ridley takes a nice, agnostic dodge, calling these sublime interactions of genes and proteins the work of the "Genome Organizing Device," or "GOD" for short. Cute, huh? At least it's a nod in the right direction. He could have chosen something that works with NOW or NAMBLA.
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