Posted on 08/24/2005 6:51:49 AM PDT by Quick1
Topeka — From Darwin to intelligent design to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The debate over teaching evolution in Kansas public schools has caught the attention of a cross-country Internet community of satirists.
In the past few weeks, hundreds of followers of the supreme Flying Spaghetti Monster have swamped state education officials with urgent e-mails.
They argue that since the conservative majority of the State Board of Education has blessed classroom science standards at the behest of intelligent design supporters, which criticize evolution, they want the gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster taught.
“I’m sure you realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory,” writes Bobby Henderson, a Corvallis, Ore., resident whose Web site, www.venganza.org, is part FSM tribute and part job search. Karl Gehring/Journal-World Illustration
Karl Gehring/Journal-World Illustration
“It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” he wrote to the education board.
Henderson did not return a telephone call for comment. He says in his letter that it is disrespectful to teach about the FSM without wearing “full pirate regalia.”
Board member Bill Wagnon, a Democrat, whose district includes Lawrence, said he has received more than 500 e-mails from supporters of FSM.
“Clearly, these are just supreme satirists. What they are doing is pointing out that there is no more sense to intelligent design than there is to a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Wagnon said.
Intelligent design posits that some aspects of biology are so complex, they point toward an intelligent creator.
ID proponents helped shepherd a report and hearings that have resulted in science standards that criticize evolution and have put Kansas in the middle of international attention on the subject.
John Calvert, of Lake Quivira, the lawyer who was instrumental in writing the science standards that criticize evolution, said he had seen the FSM e-mails, and was not impressed.
“You can only use that misinformation so long,” Calvert said. Calvert said the science standards do not promote intelligent design, but show that evolution has its critics.
Wagnon and the three other board members who support evolution have written Henderson back, saying they appreciated the comic relief but that they were saddened that the science standards were being changed to criticize evolution.
Step back and take a deep breath and smell the Semolina.
http://www.semolina.com/
You posted something bizarre one hundred posts late and someone replied from our current discussion. Then you got your noodles tangled up tighter than starting spaghetti in cold water.
Only a novitiate would do that. I would suggest studying more pasta ettiquette before returning. Remember, the great collander judges everyone.
DK
The experimental setting you refer to is a lab. In general, lab work applies to the mechanisms in the process of evolution, not the process itself. The process itself usually takes to long. The same happens in astronomy.
Evolution looks at the results that were already generated, just as in astronomy and physical laws are used to attempt to know and understand the set of results in hand. Reproducing those results again is not necessary, because they are most often duplicates and near duplicates anyway.
"Some intelligence which, while unable to create matter ex nihilo, is able to manipulate it subtly enough to create living things. Like the Demiurge of the Gnostics, for example. Or the Satan of the Albigensian Cathars."
Why can't you be honest, you have no intention whatsoever of allowing that contention to stand. The Catholics, under the authority of the Pope, tossed 200 of them into the fire, because they refused to believe and obey them.
Here's one of the things the Pope did:
Torture
"Torture was used after 1252. "On May 15, Pope Innocent IV issued a papal bull entitled ad extirpanda, which authorized the use of torture by inquisitors." It was a common part of the medieval judicial system and not particular to the inquisition. The torture methods used by inquisitors were mild compared to secular courts, as they were forbidden to use methods that resulted in bloodshed, mutilation or death. One of the most common forms of medieval inquisition torture was known as strappado. The hands were bound behind the back with a rope, and the accused was suspended this way, dislocating the joints painfully in both arms. Weights could be added to the legs dislocating those joints as well.
So much for being led by the Holy Spirit. Here's what God, the Holy Spirit says about the matter, Matt 10:14
" If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town."
Nothing has changed since that time and before. If the IDers could get away with it, they'd return to prison, torture and murder. They can't, so the art of the con is all they have left.
Please don't tempt me from the one true Rotini. I almost asked for a recipe. I feel like such an acolyte.
DK
I don't see how.
It's the Watchmaker Mystery. A group of professors stand around a table, looking at a watch on it, trying to understand how it got there. But none are allowed to say there might have been a Watchmaker.
Evolution looks at the results that were already generated, just as in astronomy and physical laws are used to attempt to know and understand the set of results in hand. Reproducing those results again is not necessary, because they are most often duplicates and near duplicates anyway.<<
Reproducing results is not necessary...that's why I love NS.
DK
Or a rolex salesman.
DK
When you ever hear of the "Law of Evolution" get back to me.
It just shows the true weakness of Adam. All Eve had was an apple? An apple!?
Then again, if it was a Granny Smith, sliced and fried with yellow onions...
You can't prove a negative (which is the big problem with ID -- they're trying to prove something cannot have arisen naturally).
Show the mechanism for change is natural.
Well, we've seen mutation, and no one was doing the mutating. And, we've seen selection, some of it envirnmental, some of it sexual, some of it at the behest of man. The first two would be considered "natural."
"ID does not even assume that the designing intelligence is God by any definition. For all ID proffers, the designer could now be dead and gone, never to be heard from again"
So then why the animosity towards the Flying Spaghetti Monster, could not his pastaness be the designer? The invisible magic guy in the sky I believe in is no less credible than your invisible magic guy in the sky!!
Ramen,
IJR
Watches don't mate & replicate.
I forget. Was it 1940 or 1952 that scientists discovered sexual reproduction? Oh wait. It was 1968. Summer of love and all that. Never mind.
" it fits all standard criteria for science"
It does not. It says the laws of physics are insufficient to govern the world.
Proof:
ID uses the laws of physics to make some calculation. The ID guy swears his logic is OK and his math likewise. The output of his calculation says, "the result of the calculation can't explain the observations."
There are then 2 remaining possibilities, because he swears his model is good:
1) The model is missing some knowledge and understanding(of physics)
2) The model is right, the physics are 100% correct, that's all the physics there is, and there's something else -an arbitrary force.
Take your choice:
The laws of physics are not sufficient and you abandon science to inject a arbitrary force , else they are and you stick with science, admit ignorance and work more.
Note: Science does not deal with arbitrary forces, nor does it deal with any intangible, unresponsive unknowns. In fact ID should not be called "intelligent design", it should be called "AD", for "arbitrary design". That's, because only the arbitary is established, not the intelligent.
I was referring to the world and how many scientists willingly ignore a possibility in order to conform with their preconceived notions.
There's the rub. I can look at physics and go, my pasta, they're building a RF pain generator to fit on a humvee to go to Iraq.
I can look at Chemistry and their working on a low temperature dry process fuel cell.
I won't mention stuff like the nanotubes, and half a dozen other amazing technolgies sprung from various physical theories.
Medicine is making tons of advances, any of them based on NS?
Were at the point of artificially inducing change in organisms, chimeras. We're doing ID right now.
NS does not seem that important, not when there are pasta questions.
DK
"I was referring to the world and how many scientists willingly ignore a possibility in order to conform with their preconceived notions."
Divine intervention is not a "possibility" that falls under the realm of science.
Then why have scientific arguments been advanced aimed at falsifying it?
One can’t say both that ID is unfalsifiable (or untestable) and that there is evidence against it. Either it is unfalsifiable and floats serenely beyond experimental reproach, or it can be criticized on the basis of our observations and is therefore testable. The fact that critical reviewers advance scientific arguments against ID (whether successfully or not) shows that intelligent design is indeed falsifiable. Michael Behe
Cordially,
Yes, especially in the fields of epidemiology and genetics.
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