Last year, right-wing pundit and flapping head Ann Coulter published a book entitled “Godless”. In it, she raised yet again the tired accusations that all Democrats are godless politicians, hell-bent (is that the right phrase?) on creating a society that crushes religion out of every private life. Sigh. Of course, she takes the obligatory pot-shot at evolution, to somehow justify that people on the left of the moral and political spectrum infuse godlessness in both thought and deed.
Last year, I hadn’t the energy to do more than skim through this sad waste of ink and paper – I was still tired from Santorum’s “It Takes a Family” rant on science education. Tonight, I stumbled upon a scathing criticism of Coulter’s anti-evolution regurgitation on a site affiliated with “Skeptic” magazine. Have a look:
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/070407_coulter_hoax.html
It’s a bit long, but worth it. My favorite passage is this one:
First, the validity of a
scientific theory does not hinge upon how it has been interpreted by
German dictators. And second, a scientific theory is not an ideology;
it aims at explaining nature, not telling us what to do. Evolutionary
biology did not oblige Hitler to kill Jews any more than nuclear
physics mandates Kim Jong-Il to acquire the atomic bomb. And the theory
of gravity does not require that you go jump off a bridge.
Amen to that. Science is not a holy scripture. It is a method. By that method, we learn about the world as it is, not as we want it to be.
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