Satirical Monsters More Competition for Darwin

E-mails offer Polk school officials a view of the origin of life they say is just as valid as intelligent design.

LAKELAND | The Flying Spaghetti Monster has stretched its noodles to Polk County.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster, or FSM, is a satirical group that pokes fun at intelligent design. It first emerged in 2005 during the debate in Kansas over whether the belief should be taught in science classes.

The group has sent dozens of e-mails to Polk County School Board members demanding that the idea of a Flying Spaghetti Monster creating the world receive classroom equal time with other views. The e-mail campaign began after four of seven board members said in November that they supported teaching intelligent design in addition to evolution.

While the idea that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world lacks backing in the scientific community, the point, according to those promoting the satire, is that neither does intelligent design.

FSM dates to 2005 when Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson sent a letter to the Kansas School Board saying "there are multiple theories of intelligent design."

"I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster," Henderson wrote.

"It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him."

Polk board members' support of intelligent design came to light after they learned the proposed science standards for Florida schools listed evolution and biological diversity as one of the "big ideas" that students need to know for a well-grounded science education.

Evolution, the theory that organic life developed and diversified through small changes over millions of years, is opposed by some evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews who believe in a literal biblical interpretation of the Earth's creation. Intelligent design holds that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some kind of higher force.

E-mails to board members can be seen on the Flying Spaghetti Monster Web site at www.venganza.org.

"I agree that children should be exposed to all sides of a scientific debate, but it is my fear you may leave out a theory that is equally as valid as traditional Intelligent Design," said one.

"I am of course referring to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm sure you all know that the theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has much greater support in the scientific community than traditional Intelligent Design. You would therefore be doing a grave disservice to the students of Polk County, and science in general, if you were to leave this ever so important theory out of your curriculum."

Most School Board members declined comment, or did not return phone messages when asked about e-mails or telephone calls from supporters or detractors of the proposed science standards.

Board member Frank O'Reilly, who supports the new science standards, said he received about 50 e-mails from FSM supporters. "It's a lot," O'Reilly said. "Most of them are from the spaghetti monster."

"I tell people it was combination of lack of sleep and divine intervention," Henderson said. "But the church has evolved into what it is today."

Henderson said he put out the open letter in 2005 to the Kansas School Board as a joke and it "snowballed from there."

Now, Henderson said there are more than a million Google results for Flying Spaghetti Monster.

"No telling where we will be in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years," Henderson wrote. "I heard Christianity started as a joke, too ... so who knows?"

Henderson said about 95 percent of the 60,000 e-mails he's received are positive.

He keeps his home address a secret and has had a "few death threats'' that he was concerned about.

"But the majority of Christians don't have a problem with our Church," Henderson wrote. "We try to be as tolerant of their beliefs as they are of ours."

Known as Pastafarians, Flying Spaghetti Monster supporters dress up as pirates. The Web site sells shirts, iPod covers and car stickers.

Currently on the Web site, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is wearing a Santa Claus hat.

Conservative voices outside of Florida also have chimed in on the science standards debate.

CitizenLink.com, an arm of the James Dobson-led group, Focus on the Family, urged its readers to take action to include intelligent design in the classroom by e-mailing the state.

So far, at least one state board member said she will vote against the new standards. Donna Callaway said she will vote against the proposed standards because evolution "should not be taught to the exclusion of other theories of origin of life," the St. Petersburg Times reported.

The state vote, which was planned for January, will likely be in February because two public meetings about the proposed standards were added in January.

The first meeting will be Jan. 3 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at The Schultz Center for Teaching and Leadership in Jacksonville, 4019 Boulevard Center Drive.

A second meeting will be Jan. 8 in Miramar from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Everglades High School. 17100 S.W. 48 Court.

The new standards have been praised by scientists. (To see the proposed standards go to www.flstandards.org.)

Lawrence S. Lerner, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at California State University in Long Beach, who has examined science standards in the various states, has graded Florida's proposed standards as a B+.

Lerner, who gave the previous standards an F, said that the proposals have the potential to be among the best in the nation.

"It's an enormous improvement," Lerner said. "The (current) standards were poorly written and bad all along."

"When you ignore evolution, it is like trying to teach physics without Newton's Law," Lerner said. "It (evolution) is dealt with quite well (in the new standards)."

I found these quotes on several sites with a quick google, but with some more work and time I could find them elsewhere, these fellows are hardly 'creationists I doubt and their credentials dwarf those of any anonymous evo freeper. Of course those mental giants called the fr evolutionist will all sneer at the quotes as ‘quote mining’ when it is plain to see what they are saying, and then replace with it links to their ~~scientific~~ propaganda site talk origins

Opinion of Thomas Huxley: Thomas Huxley, who was perhaps, the most vigorous supporter of Darwin, admitted that "evolution was not an established theory but a tentative hypothesis, an extremely valuable and even probable hypothesis but an hypothesis nonetheless. It is not universally accepted."

Professor Theodosius dobzhansky, a leading evolutionary spokesman, has admitted that "it would be wrong to say that the biological theory of evolution has gained universal acceptance among biologists or even among geneticists".

Dr. Austin H. Clark, noted biologist of the Smithsonian Institution, states bluntly: "There is no evidence which would show man developing step by step from lower forms of life. There is nothing to show that man was in any way connected with monkeys… he appeared suddenly and in substantially the same form as he is today …there is no such things as missing links. There is not the slightest evidence that any one of the major groups arose from any other, each is a special animal complex, related more or less closely to all the rest, and appearing therefore as a special and distinct creation".

Professor J. Doyle, president of the Botany section of the British Association for the advancement of science, said : "since we cannot prove the evolution of a single organism, it is intellectual presumption to talk of the universe in a thousand million years."

Dr. D’Arcy Thompson says," In the study of evolution and in our attempts to trace the decent of the animal kingdom, 80 years of study of the origin of species, has had a disappointing result. It has not taught us how birds descended from reptiles, mammals from other quadrupeds, quadrupeds from fishes, nor vertebrates from the invertebrate stock. We do not know the origin of the echinoderms, of the molluscs, of the coelenterates, nor one group of protozoa from another… this failure to solve the cardinal problems of evolutionary biology is a very curious thing."

Professor G.A. Kerkut, an evolutionist, states, "…there is the theory that all living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form. This theory can be called the ‘General theory of evolution’ and the evidence that supports it is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis."

When John T. Bonner reviewed Kerkut’s book, he said: "this is a book with a disturbing message: it points to some unseemly cracks in the foundations. One is disturbed because what is said gives us the uneasy feeling that we knew it for a long time deep down but were never willing to admit this even to ourselves. It is another one of those cold and uncompromising situations where the naked truth and human nature travel in different directions. The particular truth is simply that we have no reliable evidence as to the evolutionary sequence of invertebrate phyla. We do not know what group arose from what group or whether, for instance, the transition from protozoa occurred once or twice, or many times…; we have all been telling our students for years not to accept any statement on its face value but to examine the evidence; and therefore, it is rather a shock to discover that we have failed to follow our sound advice."

Professor Albert Fleishman, professor of comparative anatomy at Earlangan university, said: "the theory of evolution suffers from grave defects, which are becoming more and more apparent as time advances. It can no longer square with practical scientific knowledge, nor does it suffice for our theoretical grasp of the facts. The Darwinian theory of decent has not a single fact to confirm it in the realm of nature. It is not the result of scientific re-search, but purely the product of imagination."

The late Sir William Dawsaon, Canada’s great geologist, said of evolution: "it is one of the strangest phenomena of humanity; yet it is utterly destitute of proof ".

Dr. Robert A. Millikan, famous physicist and Nobel prize-winner, said in an address, a few years ago, to the American chemical society, "The pathetic thing about it is that many scientists are trying to prove the doctrine of evolution, which no scientists can do." Dr. Millikan is an evolutionist; but he is honest enough to admit it as a theory that cannot be proved.

Loren Eisley, a leading evolutionist, says: "with the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins what it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own."

Dr. D.M.S. Watson writes "…the theory of evolution itself is a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative is "special creation", which is clearly incredible."

Dr. W.R. Thompson, a world-renowned entomologist, was for many years the director of the commonwealth institute of Biological control at Ottawa, Canada and was selected to write the foreword to the new edition of Darwin’s origin of the species. In that foreword, he made the following very significant statement: "As we know, there is a great divergence of opinion among biologists, not only about the cause of evolution but even about the actual process. This divergence exists because the evidence is unsatisfactory. It is therefore right and proper to draw the attention of the non-scientific public to the disagreements about evolution. But some recent remarks of evolutionists show that they think this unreasonable. This situation, where men rally to the defence of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigor, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science".

Dr. George Wald, a noble prize winner, chooses to believe in evolution even though he regards it as a scientific impossibility. He says, "The only alternative to a spontaneous generation is a belief in supernatural creation…" He has also said, "I am convinced that the only way to prevent the total chaos that we are headed for and probably within the next ten years, is to return to God". Many others also believe in evolution for the same reasons.

Sir Ambrose Fleming, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S., president of the British association for the advancement of science, stated, "Evolution is baseless and quite incredible".

Nicholas Berdyaev, one of our great modern thinkers, wrote, "The naturalistic view of man as a product of evolution in the animal world is the feeblest of all anthropological theories…"

Dr. Arthur I Brown writes: "let me assure you that evolution is not a necessary induction from known facts; it is a creed held in spite of facts. It has had the benefit of shrewd and persistent and widespread propaganda in books, magazines and newspapers. Pictures of imaginary pre-historic scenes and ‘reconstruction’ have deluded the general public and influenced the thinking of those who have been willing to take these assertions at their face value without investigation".

Professor Leander S. Keyser made this statement, "To my mind, there are enough counts against the theory of evolution to make it impossible to accept it as a scientific truth or even as a reasonable hypothesis."

Herbert lee williams, chairman of the department of journalism, Memphis state university, writes, "It is at this point that we pass from what might be just innocent observation of similar appearances into the fantasy sphere, for hominid is a coined word, meaning ‘manlike’. You have seen hundreds of drawings and three-dimensional reproductions of creatures which were half-man and half-ape. But you’ve never seen a hominid, because it exists only in theory. All you have seen up to this point are monkeys, apes and men- and a few hundred conjectures built about the imaginary hominid."

"Believable? I suppose that depends on who you are. Before you accept such hypothesis as facts, you should amass as much scientific knowledge as Von Braun, the recognised technological genius of the twentieth century, who dismisses the theory with a comment: "There are those who argue that universe evolved out of a random process, but what random process could produce the brain of a man or the system of the human eye?" "When a man of science is a man of faith, he doesn’t become an inferior scientist. He simply becomes a superior man. The scientific method demands far more than the theory of biological evolution has been able to supply."

Fred John Meldau wrote, "In nature, we find endless variety within the species or genus: but absolutely no change from one family to another. Summed up in four words, the laws, governing all life prove there are mutations but no transmutation, which simply means that there are many varieties within any group, but there can never be one ‘kind’ of life mutating (changing) into another family."

Dr. Etheride, speaking of the great British museum, said, "In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of transmutation of species."

Professor T.H. Morgan says, "within the period of human history we do not know of a single instance of the transformation of one species into another."

"Darwin's Theory never had any proof’: Richard Goldschmidt, ph. D.,D.Sc., professor of zoology, university of california, says, "Geographic variation as a model of species formation will not stand under thorough scientific investigation. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has never had any proof... yet it has been universally accepted. Here may be wide diversification within the species… but the gap (between species) cannot be bridged… sub-species do not merge into the species either actually or ideally. Nowhere have the limits of any Species been transgressed, and these limits are separated from the limits of the next good species by the unbridged gap, which also includes sterility."

"There is not the slightest evidence"… Dr. Austin H. Clark, F.R.G.S., who is recognized as one of the world’s greatest biologists and, at one time, biologist of the United States national museum, bluntly stated that Darwin, Lamarck and all their followers were wrong on almost all vital points. "so far as concern the major groups of animals, the creationists seem to have the better of the argument. There is not the slightest evidence that any of the major group arose from any other. Each is a special animal-complex… appearing as a special and distinct creation--the greatest groups of animals in life do not merge into another. They are and have been fixed from the beginning… back-boned animal is always unmistakably a back-boned animal, a starfish is always a starfish, and insect is always an insect, no matter whether we find it as a fossil or catch it alive at the present day… If we are willing to accept the facts, we must believe that there were never such intermediates,… That these major group, from the very first, bore the same relation to each other that do at the present."

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