Last night, I was flipping through the channels when I saw this dead-eyed, purse-lipped, mackerel-faced man droning away in a pulpit. I would have clicked right past him, but he was talking about Stephen Jay Gould. I paused to listen, briefly, and later found out it was D. James Kennedy, and that his sermon is on the web (pdf). It was a very Christian sermon, full of lies and sanctimony, and it was entirely an ignorant tirade against evolution. The pdf goes on for about 60 pages; I only listened to a few minutes before I gave up in disgust.

Stephen J. Gould was the most influential evolutionist in America, a professor at Harvard University for twenty years—and then he had a great awakening: He died recently, and he met the Creator face-to-face. That must have been a horribly shocking event, to say the least. Overnight he became a creationist.

To turn a common creationist argument against him, how does he know? Was he there? Maybe he met Allah and Mohammed, and became a Muslim.

It does seem a slimy tactic to take all your dead critics and declare that they’ve had a post-mortem change of mind, and now agree with you. It comes a little too close to reveling in the death of your opponents; it’s particularly ironic when Kennedy can quote Proverbs—”All who hate me love death”—and simultaneously take such satisfaction in the death of those who disagree with him.

The sermon is a long, vile paean to ignorance that relies entirely on misrepresentation and Kennedy’s own sour misconceptions. I’ll spare you and address just one paragraph; it’s enough.

However, in one article by him he said: “Man—or even woman—as the crowning achievement of some grand cosmic plan? What mortal conceit.” To Gould the idea of the creation of man was merely a mortal conceit. “We are but an afterthought,” said Gould. “We are a little accidental twig”—the kind you would pick up off the lawn of your backyard and throw into the garbage. That is what our students are learning in our colleges: They are nothing but dried-up, little accidental twigs of no significance and no purpose.

The quotes by Gould may be accurate, but Kennedy’s interpretations are so absurdly far off that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they are entirely malicious distortions. It’s as if someone were to condemn the Golden Rule as a rationalization for cowardice, or claim that the parable of the Good Samaritan was all about the good opportunities highway robbery provides.

It is a mortal conceit to claim that we are the pinnacle of creation. We are one species that has been evolving side by side with millions of others; we are the product of the same processes that produced butterflies and whales. Even if you believe in creation by a deity, you concede that everything was created by a divine hand—does admitting that a god created ants mean it is therefore acceptable to poison human beings who step into your kitchen?

Everything that follows Gould’s comment about an “accidental twig” is a hateful and contemptible gloss on his actual words, conjured up entirely out of Kennedy’s own vile soul. Gould would never have considered that that was a statement of purposelessness, or that humans could be thrown into the garbage; quite the opposite. Here’s what he said in Dinosaur in a Haystack^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}:

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin’s revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

The improbability and fragility of our existence is reason to treasure it, not to trash it. Or again, in Bully for Brontosaurus^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}:

I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature—a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.

We are one small piece of a vast and complicated universe. Only a small-minded and petty man would think that is reason to belittle ourselves, instead of cause to love the grandeur of everything that surrounds us, and of which we are a part. That is Gould’s message—we may be a twig, but oh, look at the glorious bush we are on!

This is another piece of the treason of the Religious Right. When did we stop looking at the stars and the seas and the mountains and the plains to narrow our gaze to sectarian dogma? We Americans are people who have been gifted with the beautiful Tetons, the open prairies, spectacular Southwestern deserts, the deep forests of the Northwest, and a thousand other natural wonders, all populated with amazing life…and so many trade their appreciation of that for the bitter sanctimony of a pinched and twisted preacher’s words. A single tree is a greater marvel than the thousand bibles that could be printed from its pulped-up trunk; if we mulched every Bible published to foster the growth of a single blade of grass, we’d be the richer for it.