When we publish, we use social media to evangelise the community and spread His noodly sauce to the masses of pirates willing to hear his call. "Beer ahoy".
But not all who use the twitterverse, are pirate crew. Historical persecutions of happy noodly monster loving pirates lurk in the dark realm of the interwebs.
So this notification turned up on our twitter feed...
It seemed interesting, but what was the context, part of the context is a mind that describes itself thus in its profile
I think we can all agree, inhumanity is, well, pretty much intolerable. But why privilege "new atheist drivel above any other kind of drivel?
What makes new atheist drivel so much more intolerable than James David Manning's about how semen is the "the cream of the blood", or the his drivel about Synthetic sodomite semen in Starbuck's coffee, or perhaps Bryan Fischer's drivels about Nazis, slavery and Christian persecution in America. Like 70% of any nation can be under the thumb of a group of people who largely don't give a rats --- what they do in private, in their homes or churches.
New atheists are a broad group, drawn from many ethnicities, and more than both sexes, varying perspectives, and in America, they are mostly ex-Christian.
Moving right along, the article linked by "Brandeen" is a amusingly slimy diatribe which before it even tries to get to its real argument plays a little smug game of poison-the-well and strawman beating, first asking the reader to pity proponents of arguments it claims to be addressing.
You have to pity the modern atheist who attempts to present arguments for her cause. Unmoored from any respectable intellectual tradition, each generation is forced to recreate anti-theistic arguments from scratch. The result is that the claims which they believe to be clever and damning often turn out to be—to use a technical philosophical phrase—just plain silly.
Then the author uses a premise that is flat out wrong. The reason we prefer the unintelligent design process over the intelligent designer is that we see evidence for the process, but no evidence for the agency which would have to be a vastly more complex thing than the universe, and reasonably be some what visible in some way to the observations of science. The plausibility of the FSM is key, the mains striking differences between Christianity and Pastafarianism are that Christians hold political power, and have a long history of starting wars, while Pastafarians have never been elected to the white house, and they have never started wars. But because it is claimed to religious faith based conviction is on an equal footing with any other religion, and not to be discounted by the aforementioned striking difference between proponent groups.
Why exactly we are to prefer an unintelligent designer to an intelligent one is one of the questions that remains unanswered.
Then bait and switch kicks in, note the argument Our prophet Bobby Henderson made in his original letter was that if Kansas were to teach non scientific ideas about creation, equal treatment under the first amendment would mean that ideas other than those pushed by Christians, and the intelligent design lobby at the Discovery Institute would have to be taught. The reductio absurdum seems to be used as a smeer, which is possibly a consequence of a culture having have its bad ideas exposed for their flaws by critics highlighting the absurdities that lie with. But even without mainstream pastafarianism beating out fringe religions like Christianity, There is still Islam's exploding walnut theory of creation, Scientology's Xenu intergalactic overlord, the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime, and the great sky tortoise theory, all of which are equally plausable as sky god speaking a universe into existence that turns out to be vastly more complex than the authors of the story appeared to be capable of imagining.
Take for example, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. According to Wikipedia, The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the deity of a parody religion founded in 2005 by Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. In an open letter sent to the education board, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural Creator called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which resembles spaghetti and meatballs. He furthermore calls for the “Pastafarian” theory of creation to be taught in science classrooms, essentially invoking a reductio ad absurdum argument against the teaching of intelligent design. (The FSM has been popularized widely on the web, especially by the otherwise charming folks at BoingBoing .)
Later the article takes text out of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster out of context to construct a strawman. It attempts to seriously consider the noodly string theory as a serious theory put forward to explain the origins of the universe. But in doing so, misses a fundamental point - that the text is satirical by nature and that it should no more be taken as science than the bible, quran, Bagavad Gita, Nacromocon or the seven books of Harry Potter. Thus it is not intended to be compared to any thesis concerning origins.
The article uses the word silly as a pejorative term, which is clearly not the sense which Pastafarians use the word in relation to the Noodly words passed down to Bobby Henderson.
The claim that fine tuning suggests in anyway some intelligence has been around for some time. But the anthropic principle points to any universe not developing a complex configuration would not produce a species capable of having this conversation. It is possible that for some as yet undiscovered reason, the universal constants automatically balance to creating complexity on at least some occasions. An observation that might illustrate this is the electro magnetic force, which balances electric and magnetic fields at 90 degrees(of rotation) to each other. At this point no one is really quite sure how universal constants came to be what they are, but bald assertions that someone's invisible friend is messing with dials is no more salient to science than "Expecto petronum" is a useful method for handling ISIS in a dark alley in down town Tikrit.
Yes the argument is silly, and deliberately so, because the narrative it is designed to illuminate was written by people who did not know where the sun went a night. While their ignorance was profound, it was an honest product of having preceded empirical study in many fields that our society pretty much relies on. Without quantum physics the electrical grid and the computer itself would not be possible. the Irony that Brandeen uses both to make her case is certainly not lost on many who have seen similar claims in social media.
The article reads like the author watched an episode of SpongeBob Squarepants, thinking they were watching the Discovery channel.
See also
Original Article
The Gospel Coaliton
