Thursday, June 15, 2006

Coulter's book, Godless, on evolution

Unsurprisingly (she used William Dembski as a consultant), her book's coverage of evolution is crap:
It contains the usual stock creationist crap presented at a rapid pace, full of the usual bald assertions of outright lies, intentional misinterpretations, and lots and lots of quote mining. Seriously, it looks like every paragraph contains multiple falsehoods or screwy manglings of science.

She claims Darwin's theory is "one step above Scientology in scientific rigor", that it is a "tautology", that there is "no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record", and the only reason it's still around is that "liberals think evolution disproves God."

That's all in the first paragraph of chapter 8, which focuses on evolution. Go ahead and follow the links up there; each one is to a short, simple refutation of Coulter's claim.

Now picture a whole 27 page chapter packed with the same nonsense. I could do a sentence by sentence dissection of this abomination, but I'd have to write nothing but Coulter exposés for the next month. Forgive me if I pass on that.

Not only is it wrong through and through, but Coulter is a plagiarist. This is the book that William Dembski thinks "will propel [their] issues in the public consciousness like nothing to date"—well, yeah. Let's propel the idea that creationists are dishonest and stupid right into everyone's consciousness.

(From Pharyngula.)

1 comment:

Lippard said...

That's a very common creationist debate strategy. It's been called the "Gish Gallop."