Darwin et al.

A friend, Simply Victoria, has posted a really great logo on her blog. Scroll down till you see the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Click the link to the wiki article and read it. I like the creative protest this guy came up with, and like Simply Victoria, I love the logo. And I'm not enamoured of the creationist's position, but neither am I a Darwinian. And I was intrigued by the reference to Russell's teapot.

If you go and actually read the original theory of Intelligent Design, it's a viable alternate theory for how the universe began. It says that it was designed by an intelligence. It stops there, with the comment that the job of science is to determine how the universe began - and if it was designed by an intelligence, then the role of determining anything about that intelligence is the realm of theology. Intelligent design has no place in attributing any characteristics of any kind beyond intelligence to the creator/designer of the universe. That sounds like a good place for a scientific theory to stop.

The problem with this theory is of course, that the creationists immediately announced that there was no possible way the intelligence could be anything but the Christian God, and everybody else was heretical, wrong and needed to go read their Bibles and have an immediate conversion experience, or they'd burn in hell.

Well, okay, maybe not that bad, but they did take it over pretty quickly, and most of the opponents of Intelligent Design simply dismiss it as Creationism in disguise, which its not, which leads me to believe that most of them haven't read the darn thing in the first place. And yes, I have. But what intrigues me today is not ID vs. Darwin per se. It's the reason for the creation of the FSM.

What bothers me about the protest of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the idea that ID is being "forced" on the schools, and the students. I mean it is, but no more so than Darwin is being forced on us as well. The difference is that Darwin is entrenched, and has been taught since I think, in the US at least, the 1920's, or earlier, and that our society is basically atheist and secular and anti-religion (and by that I don't mean just anti-Christian, although that is true. It's anti-religion in general).

Think about this hypothetical situation for a moment. Say there's a family - low-income, so to make ends meet, both have to work. They have have school-age kids. Neither of the partners as practicing Christians (or Jews, or Muslims, for that matter) believe in Darwin. They're not creationists, either, or fundamentalists of whatever faith they are, but they're really unhappy with the mentality and assumptions behind Darwin's theory as it's taught in the schools. So, they can't homeschool because they can't afford to have one not work, or work only part-time, and besides it's illegal in their area, and they don't want the hassles that would bring with it.

Isn't the Darwin theory being forced on this hypothetical family just as much as ID is being "forced" on those who support the Darwinists and their view of the universe? It's not just public schools that teach this - it's private and distance education too, so we have no options here. It's Darwin or unsupervised unschooling for the kids, and that's just not viable.

It seems to me that if we were to allow more than just the one theory to be taught in schools, we might actually have some creative discussion and debate around this topic, instead of the heated rhetoric and dismissive contempt that we're seeing on both sides now. The very fact that introducing diverging opinions into the educational system is seen as "forcing" and propagandizing says that something is very wrong here. We are supposed to be a culture that encourages exchanges of ideas, debates and heated conversation about things - and how can we do that if we don't teach children a) the fact that there are diverging points of view, b) what those diverging points of view are and c) the ability for them to think for themselves and make up their own minds about those diverging points of view - whether it's about methods of cleaning up the world that has been created, or how the world actually came into being?

I don't like it when one side accuses the other of "forcing" something when the side that's doing the accusing is doing exactly the same thing but because its sanctioned by our culture, its not acknowledged as such.

More on Russell's teapot if I get enough housework done.