The Intelligent Designer's Prayer

Our Flying Spaghetti Monster,
Who art in orbit around Ramen 324,
Hallowed be thy Noodly Appendage.
Thy Pasta al dente, They Sauce be done,
On earth as it is on dishes.
Give us this day our daily meatball,
And forgive us our diets,
As we forgive those who eat fried chicken.
And lead us not into starvation,
But deliver us from tofu.
For thine is the Meatballs,
And the Pasta,
And the Sauce,
Now and forever.

RAmen.

From the Book of Pasta: Chapter 23

1) The Flying Spaghetti Monster is my buddy; I shall not starve.
2) He maketh me to lie in green parsley: He leadeth me beside marinara.
3) He filleth my stomach: He leadeth me in the paths of satire for entertainment's sake.
4) Yea, though I walk through the world of the low-carb craze, I will fear no diet: for thou art with me; thy noodly appendage it comforts me.
5) Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of Parmesan: thou annointest my salad with oil; my beer foameth over.
6) Surely meatballs and garlic will follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of good food forever; RAmen.

This thread has to be the best I've ever read. I can't stop laughing :D

This is brilliant and I am quite sure the writer of the original prayer is having a good chuckle as is his father

Roger Zelazny had a similar prayer in his book "Creatures of Light and Darkness".

The Agnistics Prayer:
Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness...

The rest can be found here:
http://www.sonic.net/~roelofs/humor/zelazny_agnostic.html

T.S Eliot's fifth section of the hollow men alludes to and quotes from the lords prayer, I think it's spirt of decay is erriely relevant to ID.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The poem, for some reason, always remind's me of the vacuity of ID. The unknown callers who shout "For thine is, life is" Yet cannot even conceive a higher reality ("between the idea and the reality" etc.) The hollowness of them, trying to piece back together some spiritual reality by invoking god, even while the world ends "Not with a bang, but a whimper". Right around them. Anyway, it's probably only me for whom this poem invokes the futility of the religious right, and ID, but that's just my two cents.

"The poem, for some reason, always remind's me of the vacuity of ID"

Let's see if I remember it...

We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men.
Leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.
Our voices, when we whisper together,
Are like wind in dry grass
Or rat's feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

Yep. Just like ID.

"Doctah Dembski. He dead. A penny for the old guy."

Amen

May the sauce be with us.

Henry

Let's see if I remember it...

We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men.
Leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.
Our voices, when we whisper together,
Are like wind in dry grass
Or rat's feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

Yep. Just like ID.

The only bit that doesn't match ID is the QUIET part in the "Are quiet and meaningless." line

"The only bit that doesn't match ID is the QUIET part in the "Are quiet and meaningless." line"

Ha! You're right, I forgot that line! (subconciously, I suppose)

To Jerusalem (preferably a cheesy bombastic MIDI, volume to 11):

And did Design in ancient time
Fall upon some clotting cascade?
Was through Intelligence sublime
the A T P-ase enzyme made?

And did some vague, near undefined
Entity's /slash/ Entities' wills
Make one flagellum spin suddenly
Among bacterial like cells?
[..]
Bring me my Irreducibly
Complex forms of some mystery!
Bring me my Probabilities:
Priors of Uniformity!

We shall not cease Quixotic fight
Supported by Tom Monaghan
'Til we have Wedged into the schools
And crushed all that's Darwinian!
(Then science shall be Wedged apart
Its quest for explanation shamed... yes, shamed... yes, shamed)

In the spirit of the Intelligent Designer's Prayer how about a New Pledge of Alligiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the Holy American Empire
And to the Republicans, whom liberals can't stand
One nation, under Design, irreducible
With ignorance and judgment for all.

Hey, Dr. Perahk, do you disapprove of Elsberry's sarcasm as much as you did mine?

And with this thread, whatever hint (and it was barely that) of scientific and/or intellectual respectibility that was left here at PT, has disappeared altogether. I for one will never take the PT crowd seriously again.

Sims, your sarcasm was rooted in ignorance, as your performance in the comment thread displayed.
Elsberry's parody is firmly grounded in the established fact of ID's religious origins and motivations which must be hidden for tactical reasons, leaving as residue a bowdlerized natural theology whose ineffectualness has been pointed out by a large number of theologians since the Enlightenment (and previously).
That this sails far far over the heads of ID acolytes like Donald M and you is testament to something informed readers have long known.

Hmm. Forgive the semantics, but does the failure to discern any 'intelligible design' (I use the variant intentionally) necessarily prove its absence? Does non-belief in 'intelligent design' consider conceptualisations of 'God' that are non-Biblical?

Creationists may just be big kids, but any 'intelligent' account, much less explanation, must consider non-material influences - specifically thought - on human existence and consequent behaviour. In order to articulate 'thought', have we not
devloped symbolic systems like mathematics to divine a non-material 'reality'? ( You might check Roger Penrose if you think this is just Platonism in the noughties...)

Even the most resolute of materialists will surely not deny that all of these posts are using another symbolic system to communicate 'concepts'?

Seems to me the 'God' word has yet to be thoroughly vanquished, since the concept is still with us, whatever it may variously mean...

Re "but does the failure to discern any 'intelligible design' (I use the variant intentionally) necessarily prove its absence?"

Nope. Otoh, I.D. doesn't logically contradict evolution anyway, or vice versa. Even proving that evolution could occur via natural processes wouldn't actually prove that I.D. didn't occur. But that said, the failure of anybody to use the I.D. concept to actually explain anything in any detail, is why scientists don't regard it as science.

Henry

Henry:

Acknowledged. But I would suggest that science's embrace of sociobiology, (though I greatly admire E.O.Wilson) is in itself unscientific since the theory extrapolates from organisms that have failed to generate symbolic systems - a species-unique, not just variant, characteristic.

If, as has hitherto been the case, psychology as a discipline continues to search for the mechanisms that account for individual differences - which take place in historical, not evolutionary time - I fail to see what sociobiology can usefully contribute to its advance. Despite this, it has been accepted as the currently most theoretically satisfactory account of human behaviour, almost to the point of dogma. I hate to say it, but women do not lust (a hormonal/endocrinological phenomenon i.e. biological) after wealthy, balding old men (Anna Nicole Smith apart - though I think she was lying): they 'mate' with them for socio-economic, cultural and psychological reasons. If anything, they are rejecting their biological 'reading' of an alpha male e.g. 'virility' with its promise of physical, not cultural 'brawn.' 'Older' to a young woman doesn't mean 'a lot.'

Geneticists, for the most part, continue to cite the phenotype (i.e. organism) as the unit of selection, Dawkins' championing of the 'selfish gene' nothwithstanding. And they do not propose that the discovery of the human genome enables prediction of behaviour, other than those governed by biologicial processes: It is largely zoologists and naturalists who subscribe to that doctrine. Neuroscientists may observe that damage to Broca's area results in speech disturbance (aphasia) but they would be reluctant to make categorical statements about the sufferer's thought processes. Neuroscience has developed the technology (to identify brain 'activity' but it does not follow that 'content' (or 'thought' - along with the body, the most significant influence human behaviour) will be 'read'like an open 'book'.

The limits of biological 'explanations' for behaviour are all too evident in Dawkins' ventures into meme-land. Culture(s) operate on completely different time-scales to evolution - which makes it difficult to see how they could possibly, in Wilson's words, 'co-evolve.' To draw an analogy: The twenty-six letters of the English alpahbet have done precious little evolving since their inception: only culture accounts for their remarkably various outcomes. And only a fool would think that a 'reduction' of Shakespeare's works (to cite only one of umpteen examples) to the letters used in their construction 'explains' them. Codes may be cracked, but even then, there is no guarantee that anything other than the simplest will reveal the intent of their authors. ('Nostradamus? haven't the foggiest what he's on about...')

Evolutionary theory was undoubtedly a milestone in advancing human understanding of life on earth. But sociobiology, like Freudianism and Marxism, is more hermeneutic than explanation. It may be a better one than either, but it is not the last word by any means. To elevate it to the level of dogma is to share the same vice as 'I want my Daddy back'Creationists.

For we remain, at the level of the individual, from moment to moment, inherently unkowable -if not always unpredictable - to one another.