Dear Sir:
As a believer in evolution, but also a believer in the divine, I find your comparison of a fake theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to another absurd theory, Intelligent Design, as laughable as intelligent design itself. Though invalid, intelligent design deserves discussion, perhaps in a philosophy class rather than a science class. I think what I am trying to say is that you are doing a disservice to reasonable debate. Yours, [xxxxxxxxxxxx], University of Utah.
or if you read the Koran – don’t strike your woman on the face, nor leave a visible mark when you admonish her.
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Nice
You clueless fool. Bobby is trying to say exactly what you said– that ID has no place in a science classroom, but he has some wit and a sense of humor.
PL&P!!!
RAmen.
This person seems reasonably reasonable, in my opinion. Go UofU!
ID is a significantly more scientific proposal than Creationism, and believe it or not it is a separate argument. The FSM more closely mimics creationism than it does ID.
Creationism is the attempt to prove that the bible is a literal and accurate portrayal of history. It was doomed to fail from the start. Intelligent Design, for the most part, does not deny that evolution occurs at some level but insists that evolution and pure chance alone cannot fully account for the complexity and diversity of life found on Earth. The main arguments for this are that a) All life seems to function on essentially the same principles, which might suggest the ‘style’ of a designer, b) Many life-forms appear to be ‘irreducibly complex’, meaning that the systems within it are codependent and could not have come about one at time, c) The holes that exist in the fossil record suggest the supposed ‘missing links’ may not exist at all, and d) The chances of everything being ‘just right’ for life to come about are too infinitesimally small to just be a coincidence. Intelligent Design argues that something else must have helped the process along.
Intelligent Design has some measure of validity as an intellectual theory, in my opinion, but that doesn’t make it science–just as neither Pastafarianism nor Last Thursdayism can be disproved. It makes the argument that complex things cannot come about by themselves (watchmaker arg.), and attempts to get rid of the problem by blaming the complexity on an infinitely more complex being. It argues that each piece of the finished product of evolution cannot perform its function without the other pieces, forgetting that the END function of a mutation may not necessarily be the same as the INITIAL function that caused it to be spread.
If life had a common origin as proposed by evolution, then it stands to reason that all life would have similar mechanisms. And of course there are holes in the fossil record, considering the slim chances of having the perfect conditions for their creation. But it does occasionally happen.
Just like life might occasionally happen. The ‘just right’ argument assumes that it’s going to be a form of life that will be similar to us that we will recognize, when it may wind up being something entirely different because it evolved in entirely different conditions. I think it’s also important to consider that an infinitesimally small chance is still nonzero, and if it hadn’t happened then we wouldn’t have been around to marvel about how small a chance it really was.