Godless

I just finished reading “Godless: the Church of Liberalism” (by Anne Coulter), and it was both surprising and what I expected.

The expected part was Ms. Coulter’s trademark rapier wit, which will have anybody who’s not clinicly disturbed both wincing and laughing. Her barbs are mainly (but not entirely!) directed at liberals, so those who are not of the liberal persuasion will doubtless find it much more entertaining. As always, I’m in awe of Ms. Coulter’s ability to sneak a zinger into the most unlikely places. One example: in this book’s discussion of radio-carbon dating, she calls it an excellent tool for determining Helen Thomas' actual date of birth. Oooh, ouch! But I laughed out loud at that one…

The surprising part was the last few chapters of the book, which are all about Ms. Coulter’s skeptical views of Darwinist evolution. Knowing that she is a devout Christian, I expected those chapters to be ideological, faith-based rants — and therefore of little interest to me. In fact, those chapters are anything but that sort of rant. They raise interesting questions about the validity of evolution that I don’t have the expertise to answer — I’ve always just accepted evolutionary theory as the consensus view of science, and presumed that it was backed with the same rigor as (say) our understanding of chemistry or physics. Ms. Coulter makes the case that in fact evolution is not backed up by the evidence.

A point she makes repeatedly is that if it’s true (as evolutionary theory asserts) that new species evovled gradually, then the fossil record should have many examples of those intermediate forms — and those fossils have not been found. For example, if it’s true that early squirrels evolved into bats (as evolutionary biologists currently believe), then where are those half-squirrel/half-bat fossils? I can’t poke any holes in this point — every possible explanation I can think of for the absence of intermediate fossils seems unreasonable, and without any evidence I’m aware of.

Ms. Coulter also uses the squirrel/bat example to make another point: the unlikeliness of many presumed evolutionary paths. In this case, evolutionary biologists posit that the short wrist and finger bones of the early squirrels gradually elongated into the wing bones of bats. She asks a good question: how on earth could having these longer and longer bones ever have done those posited (but never seen in fossils) squirrels any good? And evolutionary theory says that they must have been beneficial mutations, else they would not have survived and prospered…and eventually become bats. Interesting question, and I know of no plausible answer.

Even with my limited knowledge of evolution, I caught Ms. Coulter on one error: she criticizes science for not having observed any speciation since they started looking about 150 years ago. The fallacy there is a question of time: 150 years is a tiny, tiny fraction of 2 billion or so years that life has been evolving on Earth (assuming evolution is correct). It shouldn’t be surprising that we haven’t witnessed speciation in such a small time period.

It’s an interesting and entertaining book, and I’ll recommend it — especially to anyone who enjoys the unrestrained display of a first-class wit…