08-18-2005, 09:46 AM
Malign design
Sunday, August 14, 2005
To the editor:
I have a message for members of the Kansas School Board. As a biologist with a Ph.D. from Kansas University (1953), I wish to support the teaching of the theory that the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster — about which you have already heard from Bobby Henderson (<!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.venganza.org">http://www.venganza.org</a><!-- w -->). It seems to me that the very existence of the evolution-creation controversy and that many of you support teaching “intelligent design” as science, is in itself a powerful argument against intelligent design. Rather, it supports my more scientific theory of malign design (proven by thousands of years of theologians generating theodicies and the creation of George W. Bush).
But a scientist must keep an open mind, and it would bother me if children in Kansas were not exposed to the critical issue raised by the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), but not emphasized by Henderson. If we need a malign designer like FSM to explain Dubya, don’t we need a super malign designer to create the FSM (MDFSM)? And then a superduper malign designer to design that malign designer (SDMDFSM)? And so on, the way back.
We owe it to our children to make them learn about each malign designer in turn, so they can grasp the true magnificence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster those designers created and which then created us all.
I trust you will add these issues to what promises to be a great scientific curriculum in a state long poisoned by having among its scientists some of the great figures of evolutionary biology.
Paul R. Ehrlich,
Bing Professor of Population
Studies
Stanford University,
Stanford, Calif.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
To the editor:
I have a message for members of the Kansas School Board. As a biologist with a Ph.D. from Kansas University (1953), I wish to support the teaching of the theory that the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster — about which you have already heard from Bobby Henderson (<!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.venganza.org">http://www.venganza.org</a><!-- w -->). It seems to me that the very existence of the evolution-creation controversy and that many of you support teaching “intelligent design” as science, is in itself a powerful argument against intelligent design. Rather, it supports my more scientific theory of malign design (proven by thousands of years of theologians generating theodicies and the creation of George W. Bush).
But a scientist must keep an open mind, and it would bother me if children in Kansas were not exposed to the critical issue raised by the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), but not emphasized by Henderson. If we need a malign designer like FSM to explain Dubya, don’t we need a super malign designer to create the FSM (MDFSM)? And then a superduper malign designer to design that malign designer (SDMDFSM)? And so on, the way back.
We owe it to our children to make them learn about each malign designer in turn, so they can grasp the true magnificence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster those designers created and which then created us all.
I trust you will add these issues to what promises to be a great scientific curriculum in a state long poisoned by having among its scientists some of the great figures of evolutionary biology.
Paul R. Ehrlich,
Bing Professor of Population
Studies
Stanford University,
Stanford, Calif.