The Next Ann Coulter? A Look at Doug Giles

The only thing worse than an idiot is an idiot given a public forum. (See: Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Chuck Norris.) If one were to somehow genetically merge these three representatives into some monstrous trinity and then teach it the most abrasive style of writing ever known to man, perhaps you’d end up with Doug Giles, a columnist over at Townhall.com whose over-the-top rhetoric is at once overwhelmingly false and as aesthetically displeasing as a fetid lump of dog shit somehow compressed into more dog shit and then dusted in a fine sprinkle of–you guessed it–dog shit.

It seems that a few months ago poor Doug wrote a number of laughably trivial screeds against atheism. First, he writes, in that appallingly pseudo-hip manner of his, that atheists only disbelieve in God because they want to be immoral. After being flooded with angry responses protesting his characterization of atheists as immoral, he instead maintains that atheists can indeed be moral, but that they blatantly steal their morality from Christianity. Lost somewhere in this torrent of inanity is Doug’s own credibility, fitfully undermined by his impious backsliding. Perhaps he does not realize that the thesis of his response to the atheists, which maintains that they steal Christian morality, thoroughly contradicts his original thesis that disbelief in God is motivated by a desire to be immoral.

Worse than all the logical fallacies, or all the unsound empirical claims, or even the smirking, shit-eating grin in his avatar is his presentation, which would best be personified by a drunken frat boy parading around and yelling obscenities with his chest puffed out. Indeed, each sentence reads like a drunken finger-jab to the chest. His attempts at sounding brazen and hip fail miserably, like a paraplegic attempting gymnastics, and he instead comes off as unintelligent, slow-witted, and defensive. His snide prose oozes with horribly maligned and aborted attempts at humor and the stench of intellectual bankruptcy wafts continually from every paragraph. As I said above, his articles are like shit wrapped in shit three times over, maybe even four; perhaps in hopes that no one would be brave enough, or possess a stomach strong enough, to peel off so many encrusted layers of manure.

I, however, am not afraid. I can put up with layers of shit. You see, I live with a dog.

Doug’s descent into the lowest pits of stupidity begins, as it often does, with the Bible. He cites a verse from Romans, claiming that every human being has been endowed with knowledge of God’s existence simply through contemplation of the natural world. Like so many people who sing the praises of the teleological argument, though, he seems contentedly ignorant of the many objections that have been raised to it since the days of Hume to long before. As Richard Dawkins has recently impressed upon the masses, it would seem that the teleological argument would be just as applicable to a being as complex as a deity, necessitating an infinite regression of designers. Positing God does not ultimately explain design, for it merely posits another source of design as the origin of the universe’s design(God himself)–but then this explanation is of little help if it merely pushes the problem back onto God himself. And thanks to the brilliant insights of Darwin and Wallace, we can also finally conceive of an alternative to willful design by simply proposing unconscious selection mechanisms. We can explain the origin of life through selection pressures that reward beneficial mutations, and we can explain the origin of planets and stars by appealing to basic laws of physics and chemistry. We have little need of a God hypothesis. And as noted above, even before the days of Darwin and Dawkins there were problems with the teleological argument, many of them pointed out by David Hume, who asked how we could assume only one designer for such a huge edifice as the cosmos, or how we could not infer that the designer is some bumbling infant given the many imperfections of design, or whether we could better explain the universe’s complexity as that of a seed growing into a plant, with order arising from purely natural laws.

Doug, of course, is unphased by all of this, hunkered down with his ears plugged in his little Bible bunker.

I know the above 411 hurts the atheists to hear, seeing that they’ve staked so much of their imago on God’s non-existence. But c’mon, you know there’s Someone “out there,” so cut the crap, shave your goatee and find some other way to pick up chicks—okay, James Dean?

Yes, you see, atheists who have read this “411? have reportedly felt actual physical pain somewhere deep in their god-forsaken souls, forcing them to take this 411 and turn it into a 911 as they go into a sort of metaphysical cardiac arrest. Doug is quite right to insist that the physical pain felt in the hearts of atheists everywhere is not induced by his abrasive, in-your-face prose and breathless irrationality, but instead the outcome of the atheists’ collective realization that Doug Giles’ invocation of the teleological argument has destroyed any hope of maintaining disbelief in God’s existence. Yes, the atheists had once doubted the foundational principle of the teleological argument given its obvious inapplicability to biological diversity, and given the doubts of all the major philosophers about this argument, from those who were atheistic like Hume to those who were thoroughly religious like Kant. Somehow, though, Doug Giles had phrased it in just the right way, overcoming centuries of objections and making God’s existence crystal clear to heretics the world over. It turns out, all it took to solidify the soundness of the argument was to simply compare atheists to rebellious actors while at the same time insisting that they shave their facial hair and, apparently, cleave a turd.

Doug’s penetrating insights into the psyche of atheists is mind-numbingly prescient. He rightly points out that much of their image is sustained by their disbelief in God. It’s so true. When I go to work, people call me not by name, but by the appellation “THAT COOL DUDE WHO HATES GOD”. When I have sex, I remain totally silent, resisting the urge to call out any particular deity’s name. And, last but not least, I constantly attend my atheist church and give money to atheist preachers around the globe. I still find it amazing that Doug has managed to perceive these depths of my being. He must have realized that disbelief in God plays such a huge role in defining the images of atheists because Doug’s own hobby of not fishing defines his own existence so well. Everywhere he goes, people say, “Hello, guy who never goes fishing!” And he spends so much time not fishing, in fact, that some almost consider him obsessed by it! How can you not fish so much, these people constantly ask. Why do you constantly make not fishing the centerpiece of your image? Indeed, over at Doug’s online dating profile, in the “About Me” section, he says simply, and knowingly, “I don’t fish.” And that’s all that really needs to be said.

At any rate, Doug continues with the outstanding epiphanies, churning them out like flies crapping maggots. After chiding atheists for being bearded and rebellious, he then details the true reason atheists deny God. It turns out, they only deny God because they really, really want to get laid.

No, seriously:

The existence of God, His standards and a day of personal accountability really, really, jacks with their efforts at autonomy and their chances of getting laid tonight?

Yes, it’s all true. I admit it. I only deny God because I want to have sex without consequences. Incidentally, this is also why atheists the world over deny the existence of AIDs, refuse to wear condoms, and insist that babies are impossible. We clearly deny God because it does not cohere with our unreasonable expectations of consequence-free sex, so why not also deny all the other potential consequences? Yes, Doug has finally uncovered the secret to atheism, and has finally explained the inscrutable correlation between baby- and AIDs-denialism and atheism. (And, for the record, abstinence-only sex education has NOTHING to do with this! Correlation only implies causation for policies Doug doesn’t accept a priori!)

You know that all the various no-God arguments—which, to be sure, are fun to debate and write about and blah, blah, blah—actually stem from the root of the atheist’s refusal to curtsy to what he already internally knows is true.

For all Doug’s scathing insights, he is only partially correct here. Like Doug himself, I only refuse to curtsy to my internal knowledge because I fucking hate queers. Instead, I just exhibit a manly bow, complete with manly posture and a full-grown handlebar moustache. Anything less may implicate me. But other than that, Doug is, as usual, completely correct. The atheist’s point of view MUST be incorrect if the motive is impure, just as someone who insists that two plus two equals four only because his girlfriend has promised to sleep with him in return MUST be incorrect as well. Why examine evidence when we can examine motives–and invented, straw-man motives, to boot? Doug Giles knows rhetoric well. Now if only he could master thinking.

I say that not as any slight to Doug’s manifest intelligence, but only because he later contradicts his original position in a later article. Come on, Doug. It’s clear that your original article was totally the God’s honest truth, and that atheists are immoral swine who secretly know that God exists! Paul said it! It must be true!

But, alas, Doug seems to take a departure from his previous foray, arguing that:

[…] all your ethical codes of conduct sound strangely similar to the principles inherent to the Judeo-Christian traditions. As a matter of fact, it seems as if you have bellied up to the Bible and are treating it like a buffet . . .

Through some wonderful miracle, then, atheists must have learned how to be moral! It turns out all that talk about atheists just wanting to get laid was a load of shit, much to everyone’s surprise. But never fear, because God’s existence can still be divined from the fact that atheists are moral at all! It turns out, a claim is either wholly true or wholly false. There is no middle ground. So if atheists accept ANYTHING about Christianity (like the moral injunction not to kill), then it only stands to reason that they should accept everything else. It’s simply not possible that the Bible got portions of its morality correct and happened to fuck up its biology and cosmology! Or, as Doug so eloquently puts it with a wonderfully contemporary example:

If I were an atheist and I believed that God didn’t exist, that the Bible was a bunch of weird bunk written by religiously deluded men several thousand years ago, that Jesus was an apocalyptic, sandal-wearing, hippie forerunner of David Koresh who went around spitting out cheeky clichés who needed not to be heeded, but straight-jacketed or at least ignored—I sure as heck wouldn’t be borrowing any tidbits of His wisdom to navigate my life’s glide path.

A compelling argument, to be sure. If atheist’s truly believe that Jesus wasn’t the son of God, then they shouldn’t believe anything he says! If he had happened to remark that two plus two equals four, it is clear that we should immediately reject this as false, because if someone is wrong about ONE thing, they must be wrong about everything else! It is nice to know that Doug would willfully give up his belief that two and two make four if David Koresh had said so. In fact, I’m convinced that David Koresh did believe that two and two make four. I suppose Doug will have to find a new way to add up his paychecks.

Doug also gives us some special insight into Nietzche, writing:

Freddy is one of the few atheists who told his fellow atheistic buddies that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it, too. […] Yes, brass-balled Friedrich said that the opposite of how the Bible says to live is the way we should live.

This credible and erudite reading of Nietzsche seems a bit odd, of course. If, indeed, Nietzsche claimed that the death of God meant we couldn’t make prescriptive rules, then why exactly would he say that we should live the opposite of how the Bible says? Isn’t that a prescriptive rule? It would appear, then, that atheists can eat the theist’s cake because their cake has nothing at all to do with God.

Is Doug also oblivious to the quite obvious fact that many cultures and religions that preceded Judaism and Christianity had ethical commandments concerning murder, theft, and so on? Does this mean that Christians aren’t really Christians, and really worship the gods of ancient Greece? Perhaps he would argue that these moral precepts would hold little weight if there were no divine authority on high to enforce these rules. What, then, of secular governments that imprison and punish those who murder and steal? Indeed, isn’t it more moral to behave morally for goodness’ sake, and not out of a selfish determination to save one’s own hide? It would seem that invoking God as the enforcer of morality only weakens the power of men to be truly moral, taking away their supposed free will to make individual choices–because, let’s face it, it’s not really much of a choice between being good and getting eternal candy and being bad and getting eternal torture. One wouldn’t call it free will if I held a gun to your head and demanded that you give me your wallet, but for some reason when God coerces you with threats there seems to be no problem regarding freedom.

Indeed, like many theists, Doug takes it for granted that atheists have a difficult time explaining moral behavior. He overlooks, naturally, the same difficulty for theists. It’s not as if positing a God somehow resolves all the problems of morality. If, for instance, God is good because anything he does is good, then God is only good in a quite trivial sense. He could murder or command murder (as he does in the Bible) and it would be good–which seems to fly in the face of our real moral understanding, perhaps revealing its non-religious nature. If, however, things are only good because God recognizes them as good independent of his own nature, then it seems God has nothing to do with morality, and things would be good whether God existed or not. It seems the theist is left with the unhappy choice of relinquishing their silly “morality” argument against atheists by admitting it transcends even God, or else adopting the stance that murder and theft and even flying planes into buildings would be good so long as God commanded it. There is the added problem, of course, of knowledge. Perhaps morality could come from God’s will, but then how would you have access to God’s will? Whose interpretation of God’s will is correct–the Muslim’s or the Jew’s? Pretending that the presence of moral understanding is a problem for atheism alone is blindness and ignorance of the greatest sort.

Aside from all that talk of Nietzsche’s philosophy, atheism, morality, history, and anyhing meaningful, Doug is basically correct. For instance, at one point he says:

Anyway, back to my point. Did I make a point yet? Please forgive me. My coffee is wearing off. Okay, now I’m tracking. . . .

I couldn’t agree more. It’s just that he got all that other stuff terribly wrong. He better drink a whole pot, next time.