Toto Takes On the Flying Spaghetti Monster
by Bill Sardi by Bill Sardi
Dear Flying Spaghetti Monster followers (Pastafarians):
OK, there is no more evidence for Intelligent Design than there is for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but one wonders whether the Pastafarian pseudo-religion (the tongue-in-cheek movement that’s sweeping college campuses and the internet and now claims 10 million followers), is nothing more than another cover for the failings of the theory of evolution.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was founded in 2005 by Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson (now in Arizona) to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution.
This parody has snowballed with the publication of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster ($13.95, Villard). A few of its tenets are that a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” created the universe, Earth and its creatures, making a few mistakes on the way after drinking heavily from heaven’s beer volcano.
The Noodle Monster reached Internet fame last August when a popular website offered a $250,000 prize to anyone who could “produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” This was taking a swipe at Creationist Kent Hovind who has a long-standing similar reward for anyone who can empirically prove evolution.
Andrew Hopkins, a student at the University of New Mexico, in a letter to the editor of the New Mexico Daily Lobo, says: "I believe that creationism, evolution and the factual evidence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster should be taught in schools nationwide. My belief is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is often an overlooked faith in American culture. We have fought hard to secure our place in this great land. It would be a shame to have the Flying Spaghetti Monster left out if evolution and creationism are taught side by side in American schools." [Hopkins A, Flying Spaghetti Monster deserves class time too, The New Mexico Daily Lobo, Nov 14, 2007]
The Flying Spaghetti Monster movement now has its own logo, which resembles the Darwin fish symbol for atheism, giving followers an opportunity to create public visibility.
“Clearly, the Flying Spaghetti Monster theology is ludicrous, but no more ludicrous than intelligent design,” says Stephen Unwin, author of The Probability of God, in an article in USA Today. [Dan Vergano, ‘Spaghetti Monster’ is noodling around with faith, USA Today, March 26, 2006]
A recent Associated Press article says the "Monster’s" followers insist "Pastafarianism" is more than a joke. It calls into question "What defines a religion?" [Pope J, Scholars Mull u2018Flying Spaghetti Monster’, Associated Press, November 16, 2007]
Religion #1 vs religion #2
A recent panel discussion at the Missouri State University sought to foster discussion about "religious differences" between the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and intelligent design/creationism. [Koehler S, MSU group to host panel on faith, differences, News-Leader, Springfield, Missouri Nov. 6, 2007] Now this is more like it, one religion versus another. For it is difficult for evolutionists to fathom that evolution is nothing more than another belief system.
Evolutionists arrogantly claim higher scientific ground. Creationism is non-science, or blind faith, with all the evidence of fossilized bones, fossil layers, carbon 14 dating, and DNA-driven speciation on the other. According to a recent Newsweek poll, 91 percent of American adults surveyed believe in God — and nearly half reject the theory of evolution. So, the American public is largely stupid and the elite college-educated can only judge this debate.
Enter Toto
The exposed Wizard of Oz said to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" when Toto the dog yanked a curtain away to expose his humanity. So, would it be OK if we pitted "Toto" against the Flying Spaghetti Monster, to expose the failings of Darwinian evolution?
Fossil layer curtained pulled
Toto might pull his first curtain on the fossil layers, attested to be evidence that the earth is billions of years old and that the slow process of evolution resulted in the development of life, from single-cell water-borne organisms, to land-based animals with feet, leading to a common ancestor and homo sapiens. The problem is, the fossil layer provided no evidence for this. Evolutionists had to come up with something else to explain the incongruity of the fossil layers so the idea of "punctuated equilibrium" was conjured up — the idea that evolutionary changes occur in rapid bursts separated by long periods in which little change occurs. Of course, there is no evidence for this idea. Never mind, not to bother the Wizard. Toto walked into the wrong closet.
Toto ponders his embryonic origins
But we couldn’t keep Toto from opening a biology textbook to reveal drawings of embryos. They purport to show that hog, calf, rabbit and human embryos share a common ancestry. The embryo drawings were made by Ernst Haeckel who was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court. Haeckel’s deceit was exposed in “Haeckel’s Frauds and Forgeries,” a 1915 book by J. Assmuth and Ernest R. Hull. Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings are commonly found in modern biology textbooks.
With all of the "science" behind evolution, why did some of it have to be fabricated and republished time and again in biology textbooks?
"Toto, get back over here! Don’t open to the page showing the peppered moths." The hypothesis was that the lighter-colored peppermoth could be more easily detected when the barks of trees became darker due to industrial pollution in England and became an easy prey to birds. The peppermoths then developed a darker coloration to hide their detection, attested to be evidence of evolutionary change. But it was later revealed that these were dead moths glued on the sides of tree bark. "Toto, stay out of that textbook! You don’t know how to read. You are a dumb animal." At times a dog can be disrespectful of biology professors who write these school textbooks.
Right now evolutionists are agonizingly saying, "you aren’t going to bring that stuff up again, are you?" Evolutionists have been confronted with Haeckel’s drawings and the peppermoth story time and again. OK, let’s not go there, Toto. Let’s just hope these fabrications aren’t appearing in biology textbooks any longer.
Toto digs up old bones, and a fraud
"Toto, Toto, what do you have there?" Why it’s a copy of an August 8, 2007 newspaper about newly-found fossilized bones. Toto likes bones. The Associated Press article says:
"Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man. The new research by famed paleontologist Meave Leakey in Kenya shows our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, calling into question the evolution of our ancestors. The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday’s journal Nature.
In 2000 Leakey found an old Homo erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the Homo habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that one evolved from the other, researchers said.
Overall what it paints for human evolution is a “chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us,” Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London, said in a phone interview."
That old evolutionary cartoon, while popular with the general public, keeps getting proven wrong and too simple, said Bill Kimbel, who praised the latest findings. [Fossils paint messy picture of human evolution. Associated Press, August 8, 2007]
As one online blogger says: "Hey, you know the reason that it’s always been so hard to find that "missing link" guy? Because. Maybe. It. Was. Never. There."
Evolutionists believe in the common ancestor idea based upon no physical evidence. They just believe it exists. Isn’t that a religion, not science? Are the drawings of apes turning into humans nothing more than wishful thinking? And yet that is what continues to be published in textbooks. The theory of evolution faces the revelations of the next uncovered fossils. Does the scientific community have the integrity to erase its strongly-held beliefs as new evidence arises? When it comes to the origins of the universe and life, why can’t the scientific community just say "we don’t know"?
Scientific community extols itself: life "almost" created in a test tube
Science has a way of extolling itself. The University of Chicago held a 50th anniversary in 2003 of an experiment by a young chemist, Stanley Miller. Toto should have been there. Miller attempted to recreate the conditions during earth’s early days by sparking electricity through a mixture of water and gases in a sealed flask. This was the first attempt to create life in a test tube from a "primordial soup." But why was the University of Chicago memorializing a failed experiment?
A New York Times article said: "Despite a brilliant beginning, neither he (Miller) nor others were able to take the next step, that of providing a plausible mechanism by which these chemicals could have been assembled into living cells or the macromolecules — DNA and proteins — on which cells depend." [Wade N, Stanley Miller, Who Examined Origins of Life, Dies at 77. May 23, 2007]
But Miller didn’t see his work as a failure, and the scientific community never scrutinized his work as they should. Miller almost created life in a test tube. That was good enough for the scientists.
Astrobiology Magazine interviewed Miller in 2003 and asked if he had any "retrospective thoughts on what was going through his mind at the moment he starting flipping the electrode switch, and how successfully the experiment would carry forward as a classic at that time?" Astrobiology Magazine dubbed it a success and Miller agreed. [Primordial Recipe: Spark and Stir, Astrobiology Magazine May 14, 2003] Toto’s ancestors could breathe oxygen 3.5 billion years ago
Miller’s experiment parroted a strongly held belief that life evolved 3.5 billion years ago in an Earth environment that was oxygen-less. Advanced forms of life couldn’t have existed, as creationists claim, because there was no oxygen in the atmosphere.
A widely-held theory is that, for the first half of Earth’s 4.56-billion-year history, the atmosphere held almost no oxygen, other than that bound to hydrogen in water or to silicon and other elements in rocks. Then, some time between 2.3 and 2.4 billion years ago, oxygen rose sharply in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans from oxygen-producing bacteria.
But there is Toto again, digging up rocks in Australia, as dogs do. Turns out, Australian geologists have dug up rocks which show, using rock-strata dating, that there was an oxygen-rich atmosphere as long as 3 billion years ago, or even earlier.
The scientists base their case on the presence of iron-rich nodules in the deep strata of the Witwatersrand — nodules they believe are pisoliths, small balls containing ferric iron produced by exposure to an oxygen-rich air. The researchers’ theory has been lent additional weight by evidence from the Western Australian Pilbara region for the presence of sulfates in rocks up to 3.5 billion years old. These, too, could not have formed without an oxygen-rich atmosphere. [Earth Atmosphere Rich In Oxygen 3 Billion Years Ago? CSIRO Exploring & Mining, Professor Neil Phillips, Julian Cribb, Jan. 15, 2002]
The speed of Toto
Toto is pretty quick, for a dog. He can dart across the lawn to catch a frisbee "in no time at all," as they say. Well, that’s what cosmologists are now saying about the speed of light.
Of course, those who embrace evolution cling to the fact Biblical creationists maintain a seemingly implausible 6000-year-old universe, while evolutionists can convincingly show millions to billions of years have actually passed. The problem here is that these schemes to date the age of the cosmos and the Earth are based upon a constant speed of light, or a given rate of decay.
In about 12 billion years, the estimated age of the universe, light traveling at 186,320 miles per second, would have only traveled part way across the cosmos. But photons of light have traversed the entire universe. Then light must have traveled much faster than 186,320 miles per second in the distant past. How much faster? About 10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, times faster. [The London Times, Dec. 24, 2000] That means not nearly as much time has passed.
This is not a subject evolutionists want to discuss. They have to have those billions of years for the theory of evolution to work. Professor Joao Magueijo, a lecturer in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London, brought this to the scientific community’s attention in his landmark book: Faster Than The Speed of Light.
Final note
But evolutionists maintain that none of this evidence, the pisoliths, the human fossil bones, the faster speed of light, can be used to disprove evolution. But will students in school ever be exposed to ANY information that runs contrary to the hallowed theory of evolution? Science hates dogma, but it has created its own! Why, if Biblical creation is so nonsensical and implausible, would it not be roundly exposed for its failings by including it in biology textbooks instead of ignoring it? Are students not able to comprehend? Can they not think for themselves? Isn’t that the idea of the educational process to learn to think skeptically?
So the Darwin fish has evolved into the spaghetti-like truth monster. Do those who embrace the theory of evolution recognize the spaghetti monster can turn the tables on them?
