Thursday, April 13th, 2006,
by Fred (,
education, evolution, FSM, intelligent design, Kansas, politics
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So what happens when one of the ignorant cavedwellers who voted for Kansas’ new anti-science science curriculum comes face to face with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a deity created specifically to show how ignorant the Kansas Board of Education is? Not pretty.
Creature’s picture irks Board of Ed member
State Board of Education member Connie Morris took exception Wednesday to a picture of a made-up creature that satirizes the state’s new science standards hanging on a Stucky Middle School teacher’s door.Fellow board member Sue Gamble told The Eagle that Morris asked for the picture to be removed.
The creature, called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is the creation of Bobby Henderson of Corvallis, Ore. It looks like a clump of spaghetti with two eyes sticking out of the top and two meatballs flanking the eyes.
Henderson created the entity and an accompanying mythology on the origin of mankind to make fun of Kansas’ recent debate over the teaching of criticisms of evolution, including intelligent design.
In November, the board voted 6-4 to allow criticisms of evolution to be taught in Kansas schools.
Who won the battle? FSM, of course.
Gamble said she told the principal that it was his decision whether the monster could stick around.
“I advised the principal that Morris has no authority,” she said. “I told him to deal with his staff as he saw fit, not by what a state board member says.”
The picture was still on the door at the end of the school day Wednesday.
[via evolution]
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Wednesday, March 29th, 2006,
by Fred (,
evolution, FSM, intelligent design, science
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As part of the previous post about the FSM, I went to the Discovery Institute site to see if they had a response to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. They don’t, other than a Jeff Jacoby column from the Boston Globe in 1995 that makes this absurd assertion:
If intelligent design proponents were peddling Biblical creationism, the hostility aimed at them would make sense. But they aren’t. Unlike creationism, which denied the earth’s ancient age or that biological forms could evolve over time, intelligent design makes use of generally accepted scientific data and agrees that falsification, not revelation, is the acid test of scientific validity.
Except that they are peddling biblical creationism, and they don’t make use of “generally accepted scientific data”. From Judge Jones’ order in Kitzmiller:
- Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer
could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants’ expert witnesses.
- ID proponents Johnson, William Dembski, and Charles Thaxton, one of the editors of Pandas, situate ID in the Book of John in the New Testament of the Bible, which begins, “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.â€
- Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.
- The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.
And what about ID’s devotion to scientific principles?
- ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.
- What is more, defense experts concede that ID is not a theory as that term is defined by the NAS and admit that ID is at best “fringe science†which has achieved no acceptance in the scientific community.
- Accordingly, the purported positive argument for ID does not satisfy the ground rules of science which require testable hypotheses based upon natural explanations.
- In addition to failing to produce papers in peer-reviewed journals, ID also features no scientific research or testing.
So, since ID is biblical creationism, the hostility directed at its proponents makes sense. Glad we cleared that up.
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