When did Dean Konntz become a creationist?

TimCallahan

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Perhaps this thread belongs more in religion and philosophy; however, since it involves a popular author, I decided to start it, at least, in this forum.

Last night I finished one of the light books I use as bedtime reads. It was Breathless by Dean Koontz, published in 2010. The book has several flaws, among them the fact that it takes a long time to build up, then has to rush to a sort of deus ex machina conclusion in too few pages at the end, without tying up all the threads in a satisfying manner. Another flaw is that the villains of the piece are simply too evil-because-they're evil-because-they're-evil to be believed.

However, the worst thing about the book, something that surprised, shocked and saddened me, was Koontz's incredibly stupid and dishonest attack on the theory of Darwinian evolution. He puts in the mouth of one of his main protagonists, presented as a mathematician specializing in chaos theory, a bunch of pseudo-mathematical hogwash to the effect that evolution in impossible and even says that the fossil evidence doesn't support it. This attack is on pages 350 -352. Here's one of the quotes from the bottom of page 350 and the top of page 351:

Lamar shook his head. "They say - here are fossils showing the horse in its stages of its evolution. But they're only assuming the fossils are related. These fossils may more likely be of different species instead of stages of the same one. They prove nothing. The other specie became extinct. The horse didn't. And the assumption that these fossils are arranged in the correct order, showing progression in certain features, can't be supported with evidence. Neither carbon dating nor any method of fixing the period of a fossil is precise enough to support that arranged order. Again, they've been assumed to belong in that order, but mere assumptions do not qualify as science.

There are so many falsehoods in the paragraph above that it's hard to know where to start in debunking it. However, as bad as that is, it's not the entirely of Koontz's attack on evolution and science. Here's another gem of pseudoscience from the top of page 352 Lamar goes on to say:

" . . . But the tiniest worm on earth could not have evolved from a one-celled organism in four billion years even if there had been a mutation in every one of those millionths of a second."

Koontz does not bother to support this assertion, any more than he bothers to support another assertion he puts in the mouth of this character in the middle of page 351, that Darwinian evolution offends "virtually every mathematician who has seriously thought about it."

I was so grievously offended by this pseudo-science crap that I doubt I will be able to ever be able to enjoy another Koontz novel again. What is particularly damaging about this is that unsophisticated readers may well assume Koontz knows what he's talking about and believe this steaming heap of creationist dog_ _ _ _.
 
After having read a few of his books (too many of them), I am not surprised. He's an okay writer, but most of his books are the same recycled crap, and I've noticed the good/evil simplistic crap in each one. Not surprised at all about the creationism, though this story sounds more blatant than the past ones.

There was a pretty funny characterization on Squidbillies of Koontz...
 
People that read Koontz novels already believe the woo in most cases. Koontz writes about woo and his readers, mostly of limited intellect, swallow the premise without question.
I suggest stocking your library with better writers of that style fiction. Try Robert McCammon or Peter Straub, much better writers IMO.
 
sloinker said:
People that read Koontz novels already believe the woo in most cases. Koontz writes about woo and his readers, mostly of limited intellect, swallow the premise without question.
I suggest stocking your library with better writers of that style fiction. Try Robert McCammon or Peter Straub, much better writers IMO.
Click to expand...

In the past, I've never had problems with the supernatural aspects of his books. I just assumed it was a horror aspect. Also, a lot of his villains in previous books were excessively over the top, i.e. evil because they were evil. However, in those other works he did develop the character to some degree. One of his villains in Breathless is a high powered attorney who, with no previous development of his character, hires a hit man to kill both his wife and his own son. This is simply too ridiculous. He could easily divest himself of his wife - we aren't given a satisfactory reason why he detests her enough to hire someone to murder her - by divorce, or, better and simpler yet, just keep her around while he also plays the field. The idea that he'd have his own child killed is absurd without some extensive build-up of his character.

The same is true of the other master villain, who shows up at his estranged twin brother's farm, supposedly for a reunion, then murders him and his wife, so he can assume his brother's identity. He's doing this so he'll have a safe haven from which to ride out the coming disintegration of both government and society. However, we are never told why the whole system is about to implode. He should have been able to manage that in a book that's over 300 pages long. Like the other villain, this one is evil because he's evil. To make things worse, he, an apparently super logical person, rapidly degenerates and ends up blowing himself up because he is being haunted, presumably by the vengeful ghost of his brother - or is it something else. Koontz never ties that one up either.

Frankly, were a novice writer to try to sell the manuscript of Breathless, he either (a) couldn't get an agent to represent it or (b), in the case of those rare publishing houses that still accept un-agented manuscripts, it wouldn't make it past the slush pile. In my opinion he was coasting when he wrote this one. It was guaranteed sales because of his name. He won't be able to keep pulling crap like this. As I said, even without the creationist crap, it's a very flawed piece of work.
 
I haven't read that one yet, but I'm not surprised. Seems like a lot of Koontz's work lately has a definite Christian angle. I'd almost rather have the antagonist being "evil because they're evil" than the suggestion I've picked up from some other books (Darkest Evening of the Year being the first to spring to my mind) that the bad guys are evil because they lack faith.
 
Heh, I'm reminded of a scene from Family Guy. Brian is driving along a quiet road at night and accidentally runs over a guy walking by the side of the road. He stops the car and runs out to help the guy, and asks him, "Are you Stephen King?" The guy replies, "No, Dean Kootnz." At which point Brian gets back in the car, backs over the guy, then drives off.
 
I'm not a big fan of Koontz, but I have to ask: Is there some reason to think Koontz is a creationist other than one of his characters being one?
 
I found this:

I can walk in the rose garden, watch the joyful capering of my dog and see the indisputable work of God. The key is beauty. If the world is merely a complex and efficient machine, beauty is not required. Beauty is in fact superfluous. Therefore beauty is a gift to us. If we were soulless machines of meat, the survival instinct would be all we needed to motivate us. The pleasures of the senses — such as taste and smell — are superfluous to machines in a godless world. Therefore, they are gifts to us, and evidence of divine grace. The older I’ve gotten, the more beauty, wonder and mystery I see in the world, which is why there are ever more of those three things in my books.
Click to expand...

This is in an interview with a Catholic newspaper as apparently he converted to Catholicism. No idea why he became a Creationist too. Is the Pope a Creationist?
 
angrysoba said:
I found this:

This is in an interview with a Catholic newspaper as apparently he converted to Catholicism. No idea why he became a Creationist too. Is the Pope a Creationist?
Click to expand...

Many right-wing American Catholics are creationists too, since they subscribe principally to the American political religion of Christianism, for whom creationism is a core tenet of the faith. See: Pat Buchanan, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich (convert & fake creationist). This is a union forged in the anti-abortion and sexual politics struggles of recent decades.
 
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RecoveringYuppy said:
I'm not a big fan of Koontz, but I have to ask: Is there some reason to think Koontz is a creationist other than one of his characters being one?
Click to expand...
I'd have said the same thing if it weren't Koontz doing the characterisation. Better authors give their characters their own personalities. Lesser authors paint their own personalities onto their characters.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
I'm not a big fan of Koontz, but I have to ask: Is there some reason to think Koontz is a creationist other than one of his characters being one?
Click to expand...

This particular character, one of the chief protagonists in the book, appears to be voicing the view of the author, particularly the way the scene is laid out and its position at the climax of the book. A vague and lame rebuttal to his views is proposed and knocked down in typical straw-man fashion.

Oh, BTW, the two strange creatures, Puzzle and Riddle, seeming to represent angelic innocence, can morph their hind legs to go from a digitigrade leg and foot, found in cats and dogs, to a human plantigrade at will, even though this would involve total reworking of the leg's bone an muscle structure. At the very end of the book, despite the fact that the two have tails and are covered with beautiful white fur, it turns out that their genome is fully identical to that of human beings.
 
angrysoba said:
I found this:



This is in an interview with a Catholic newspaper as apparently he converted to Catholicism. No idea why he became a Creationist too. Is the Pope a Creationist?
Click to expand...

hgc said:
Many right-wing American Catholics are creationists too, since they subscribe principally to the American political religion of Christianism, for whom creationism is a core tenet of the faith. See: Pat Buchanan, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich (convert & fake creationist). This is a union forged in the anti-abortion and sexual politics struggles of recent decades.
Click to expand...

Holy crap! Is this what modern atheists actually believe?
 
theprestige said:
Hrm. Let me back up: How would you define "Creationist" in your post below?
Click to expand...

A Creationist is someone who denies evolution by natural selection as the origin of species, as per the OP's description of a character in a Koontz novel.

It is my understanding that Catholics do not usually deny evolution by natural selection, and my understanding is informed by having been raised one myself and going to a Catholic school where we were taught evolution by natural selection.

I am still not at all sure how to charitably interpret your comment "Holy crap! Is this what modern atheists actually believe?" in a way that allows it to make any sense within the context of the thread.

I pray for you to enlighten me.
 
TimCallahan said:
In the past, I've never had problems with the supernatural aspects of his books. I just assumed it was a horror aspect. Also, a lot of his villains in previous books were excessively over the top, i.e. evil because they were evil. However, in those other works he did develop the character to some degree. One of his villains in Breathless is a high powered attorney who, with no previous development of his character, hires a hit man to kill both his wife and his own son. This is simply too ridiculous. He could easily divest himself of his wife - we aren't given a satisfactory reason why he detests her enough to hire someone to murder her - by divorce, or, better and simpler yet, just keep her around while he also plays the field. The idea that he'd have his own child killed is absurd without some extensive build-up of his character.

The same is true of the other master villain, who shows up at his estranged twin brother's farm, supposedly for a reunion, then murders him and his wife, so he can assume his brother's identity. He's doing this so he'll have a safe haven from which to ride out the coming disintegration of both government and society. However, we are never told why the whole system is about to implode. He should have been able to manage that in a book that's over 300 pages long. Like the other villain, this one is evil because he's evil. To make things worse, he, an apparently super logical person, rapidly degenerates and ends up blowing himself up because he is being haunted, presumably by the vengeful ghost of his brother - or is it something else. Koontz never ties that one up either.

Frankly, were a novice writer to try to sell the manuscript of Breathless, he either (a) couldn't get an agent to represent it or (b), in the case of those rare publishing houses that still accept un-agented manuscripts, it wouldn't make it past the slush pile. In my opinion he was coasting when he wrote this one. It was guaranteed sales because of his name. He won't be able to keep pulling crap like this. As I said, even without the creationist crap, it's a very flawed piece of work.
Click to expand...

I see what you are saying and believe that publishers will release anything a writer puts his name to if it brings in the dough. I stopped reading the Jack Reacher novels because they became too over the top for my suspension of dis-belief to overcome. Jack Reacher has jumped the shark and I haven't read a Koontz novel for 20 years because the pattern of suck was already inherent at that time.
 
angrysoba said:
A Creationist is someone who denies evolution by natural selection as the origin of species, as per the OP's description of a character in a Koontz novel.

It is my understanding that Catholics do not usually deny evolution by natural selection, and my understanding is informed by having been raised one myself and going to a Catholic school where we were taught evolution by natural selection.

I am still not at all sure how to charitably interpret your comment "Holy crap! Is this what modern atheists actually believe?" in a way that allows it to make any sense within the context of the thread.

I pray for you to enlighten me.
Click to expand...

Ah, ok, so that is what you believe. I guess the language has moved on, since the last time I checked... There was a time, I would have said that the Pope was obviously a Creationist, seeing as how a creator god as the literal origin of all things is a fundamental tenet of the Catholic Church--even if they do also accept evolution by natural selection. In that context, your question about the Pope's stance on Creationism struck me as ignorant to the point of absurdity.

But clearly your definition is so far divergent from mine that there's no real basis for judgement. I'll keep that in mind going forward.
 
theprestige said:
Ah, ok, so that is what you believe. I guess the language has moved on, since the last time I checked... There was a time, I would have said that the Pope was obviously a Creationist, seeing as how a creator god as the literal origin of all things is a fundamental tenet of the Catholic Church--even if they do also accept evolution by natural selection. In that context, your question about the Pope's stance on Creationism struck me as ignorant to the point of absurdity.

But clearly your definition is so far divergent from mine that there's no real basis for judgement. I'll keep that in mind going forward.
Click to expand...

It is a pretty common usage of the term and it surprises me that you have never come across it before. Or is this surprise at this particular usage merely a pose?
 
angrysoba said:
It is a pretty common usage of the term and it surprises me that you have never come across it before. Or is this surprise at this particular usage merely a pose?
Click to expand...

Nope, the surprise is sincere. As to your perception that it's pretty common usage, I've already acknowledged that the language seems to have moved on since I last took a good look at it. Beyond that, I suspect we're each suffering from a mild case of "nobody I know voted for him!"
 
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