Have you heard about Flying Spaghetti Monsterism? FSM is a four-month-old “religion” founded on the belief that the universe was created by an invisible flying clump of spaghetti and meatballs. This blob of pasta, FSM followers say, uses its “noodly appendage” to control human affairs.

When the Kansas Board of Education took up the question of teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, Henderson concocted the FSM parody demanding equal classroom time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism as well.

As religious spoofs go, it wasn't exactly Monty Python's “Life of Brian,” but it was good for a chuckle or two. But he underestimated the eagerness of many Darwinists to paint intelligent design supporters as moronic Bible Belters or conniving religious fanatics. Henderson's “religion” was promoted with relish on websites and in the press. A NYT story was headlined, “But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?”

At least Henderson couched his disdain for intelligent design in humor. Other Darwinists, many steeped in ideological antipathy to religion, resort to insult and invective.

“It is safe to say,” the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, a leading Darwinist, has written, “that somebody who claims not to believe in evolution is ignorant, stupid, or insane.” Liz Craig, a member of the board of Kansas Citizens for Science, summarized her public-relations strategy: “Portray the intelligent design advocates in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.”

Ironically, Charles Darwin himself acknowledged reasonable challenges to his theory of natural selection. According to sociologist and historian Rodney Stark, when “The Origin of Species” first appeared in 1859, the Bishop of Oxford published a review in which he acknowledged that natural selection was the source of variations within species, but rejected Darwin's claim that evolution accounted for the appearance of different species in the first place. Darwin read the review with interest, acknowledging that “the bishop makes a very telling case against me.”

How things have changed. When John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee in 1925, religious fundamentalists fought to keep evolution out of the classroom because it was at odds with a literal reading of the Biblical creation story.

Today, Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at odds with a strictly materialist view of the world. Eighty years ago, the thought controllers wanted no Darwin; today's thought controllers want only Darwin. In both cases, the dominant attitude is authoritarian and closed-minded -- the opposite of the liberal spirit of inquiry on which good science depends.

As always, those who challenge the reigning orthodoxy face repercussions. In April, the science journal Nature interviewed Caroline Crocker, a molecular microbiologist. Because “she mentioned intelligent design while teaching her second-year cell-biology course... she was barred by her department from teaching both evolution and intelligent design.” Other skeptics of Darwinism choose to keep silent. When Nature approached another researcher, he refused to speak for fear of hurting his chance to get tenure.

If intelligent design proponents were peddling Biblical creationism, the hostility aimed at them would make sense. But they aren't. Intelligent design makes use of generally accepted scientific data and agrees that falsification, not revelation, is the acid test of scientific validity.

Intelligent design isn't a scientific theory but a restatement of a timeless argument that the regularity and laws of nature imply a higher intelligence responsible for its design. Intelligent design makes no religious claim. It does say that when such evidence appears, researchers should take it into account, and that the weaknesses in Darwinian theory sh

ould be acknowledged as forthrightly as the strengths. That isn't primitivism or Bible-thumping or flying spaghetti. It's science.

Dr. Charles Townes, Nobel laureate and laser co-inventor, told Steve Inskeep of NPR : Religion is an attempt to understand the meaning of our universe. Science is an attempt to understand how it works. We use our human abilities to understand both.

Science, too, has faith. We believe in postulates but can't prove them, and sometimes these postulates are wrong. For example, most scientists once thought the universe could not have had a beginning. It was always here; Einstein felt so. Now scientists discovered, yes, there was indeed a beginning to our universe.

Yes, there are revelations in science. I think of my own recognition of how to amplify light and microwaves, discovery of the maser and the laser, that I'd been working on for some time. I sat on a park bench and suddenly got the idea, a revelation. It's a little like Moses wondering how to help his people, then in front of a burning bush, he knew, “This is what ought to be done.”

Within the last few decades, science notes more and more the special nature of our universe. The laws of physics have to be certain ways in order for us to be here. If it changed just a little, we couldn't be here. Unfortunately, if we start labeling that intelligent design, it is dismissed as just fundamentalist, but many scientists realize the thumbnail definition of intelligent design, that our universe is so complicated that it must have been designed. That's very striking.

Courtesy of the Boston Globe