Pirates, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Intelligent Design: Personal Response
Greetings,
In my bloglines, I have feeds from four different news sources. One of these is CNN, and recently they ran an article about Sea Piracy being on the rise again. I know what you may thinking, “Sea Pirates, what does this have to do with Education,” but trust me, it does, in a very roundabout way. Returning to my topic, however, I remember thinking, jokingly, “Wow, Pirates are on the rise again, this might mean the end of Global Warming.” I was referring to the ‘theory’ of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), and how this ‘religion’ states that the average rise in global temperature is related to the decline in piracy acts. Of course, I sincerely doubt that they truly believe in the FSM, but rather use it as a weapon against teaching intelligent design.
Intelligent design, even though I personally believe in a form of it, should not be taught in school. Schools, especially the science departments, should teach students how to gather information, perform experiments, and come to a conclusion based on the evidence. Intelligent design does not do this, and, in my opinion, does the exact opposite, it does not have most of the properties that a hypothesis requires to become a theory. Most importantly it lacks the potential of people performing experiments and supporting or detracting from the theory. Of course, this doesn’t lessen the amount of people who believe in ID and want it taught in schools. Their main argument is that science is kind of a religion (which is based on logic and promotes secularism and materialism), and that if we are going to teach “Scientism,” we must also spend “equal time for all theories.” This is where FSM comes in. The originators of FSM have decided that if science and ID should be taught, there can be no limit to the different ‘theories,’ and thus created a new religion and answered the same manner that the proponents of ID did. Their goal was to show the supporters of ID the folly of their argument via analogy.
To sum up, although I believe in both the existence of a God and evolution, I don’t think that it should be taught in schools, because the purpose of schools is to teach students to try to fill in the cracks in human knowledge with facts and not the catch-all, ‘God made it so’.
Websites:
Sea piracy hits record high. CNN. 25, January 2006.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/01/27/pirates/index.html.
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 25, January 2006.
http://www.venganza.org/
Intelligent Design. Wikipedia 25, January 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
