At the DI’s offi­cial blog, DI asso­ciate direc­tor/vice-pres­i­dent John West asks Why Does Nation­al Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion (NCSE) Spokesman Think “Mock­ing Tra­di­tion­al Reli­gion” is OK?
Set aside that the spokesman in ques­tion does­n’t defend the act of mock­ing tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. He respond­ed to the DI’s whin­ing about the Nood­ly One by ask­ing a very good ques­tion: “Why would mock­ing tra­di­tion­al reli­gion be of con­cern to a pure­ly sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tion?” This can be read­i­ly tak­en as a response to Casey Luskin insis­tence (on Christ­mas Day) that “it’s … clear that the FSM images are intend­ed to mock tra­di­tion­al religion.” 

It’s true that Luskin, and appar­ent­ly West, think that the FSM is a mock­ery of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. And that it is worth the time of two senior mem­bers of a sup­pos­ed­ly sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tion to use offi­cial resources to denounce this mock­ery at length. Glenn Branch’s ques­tion deserves an answer.

West and Luskin’s out­rage is all very fun­ny, because any argu­ment you could make about Pasta­far­i­ans mock­ing tra­di­tion­al reli­gion applies equal­ly well to IDC.

The cen­tral premise of IDC is that it is pos­si­ble to sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly test the exis­tence of God super­nat­ur­al design. The fol­low­ers of the Spaghet­ti Mon­ster agree, and are sim­ply more will­ing than John West or Casey Luskin to iden­ti­fy who that super­nat­ur­al design­er is. They apply the DI’s argu­ments about aca­d­e­m­ic open­ness, and demand that their beliefs about super­nat­ur­al design via nood­ly appendages deserve the same access and respect in the class­room that West and Luskin’s anony­mous design­er does.

We will set aside, for the moment, the dis­re­spect and mock­ery implic­it in West and Luskin’s will­ing­ness to equiv­o­cate about the iden­ti­ty of their Design­er. Every­one knows that it is the Chris­t­ian God, a God not known for want­i­ng fol­low­ers to hide their lights under a bushel.

The idea that we can, through human and nat­u­ral­is­tic mean, know what God does or does­n’t intend, or what God is or isn’t capa­ble of, is deeply offen­sive to tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. In the book of Job, Job’s friend Eli­hu tells him “The Almighty – we can­not find him; he is great in pow­er and jus­tice, and abun­dant right­eous­ness he will not vio­late. There­fore men fear him; he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.”

Eli­hu thinks that say­ing this will chas­ten Job and make him under­stand that he deserved the ills that had befall­en him. The read­er, of course, knows that God allowed those ills on the basis of a bet rem­i­nis­cent of the open­ing wager in Trad­ing Places. The read­er under­stands that it is Eli­hu that regards him­self as wise in his own con­ceit. But that does­n’t suf­fice for the tra­di­tion­al God. Out of the whirl­wind, God answers Job and his friends, saying:

Who is this that dark­ens coun­sel by words with­out knowledge?
Gird up your loins like a man, I will ques­tion you, and you shall declare to me.

Where were you when I laid the foun­da­tions of the earth?
Tell me if you have understanding.

And so forth. For three chap­ters, God points out the won­ders and com­plex­i­ties of the world, and mocks Job and his friends for think­ing that they can under­stand why or how God does what he does.

Job, final­ly repen­tant, replies “I have uttered what I did not under­stand, things too won­der­ful for me, which I did not know. … there­fore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

That is tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. It states that there are unknow­able truths in the uni­verse, that God’s will is beyond our human ken. You find the same sen­ti­ments in St. Augustine’s writ­ing, in which he urges a fig­u­ra­tive under­stand­ing of the cre­ation in Gen­e­sis. In elu­ci­dat­ing his read­ing of the Logos, which Bill Dem­b­s­ki claims his approach to ID repli­cates, Augus­tine does not insist on a lit­er­al cre­ation by a spo­ken word. In The Lit­er­al Inter­pre­ta­tion of Gen­e­sis, he asks:

what mean­ing oth­er than the alle­gor­i­cal have the words: “In the begin­ning God cre­at­ed heav­en and earth?” Were heav­en and earth made in the begin­ning of time, or first of all in cre­ation, or in the Begin­ning who is the Word, the only-begot­ten Son of God? And how can it be demon­strat­ed that God, with­out any change in Him­self, pro­duces effects sub­ject to change and mea­sured by time?

And so forth. You’ll find that Augus­tine asks many ques­tions in the chap­ters on the first few lines of Gen­e­sis, but offers few con­crete asser­tions of its meaning.

He lat­er explains why:

Let us sup­pose that in explain­ing the words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light was made,” one man thinks that it was mate­r­i­al light that was made, and anoth­er that it was spir­i­tu­al. As to the actu­al exis­tence of “spir­i­tu­al light” in a spir­i­tu­al crea­ture, our faith leaves no doubt; as to the exis­tence of mate­r­i­al light, celes­tial or superce­les­tial, even exist­ing before the heav­ens, a light which could have been fol­lowed by night, there will be noth­ing in such a sup­po­si­tion con­trary to the faith until un-erring truth gives the lie to it. And if that should hap­pen, this teach­ing was nev­er in Holy Scrip­ture but was an opin­ion pro-posed by man in his igno­rance. On the oth­er hand, if rea­son should prove that this opin­ion is unques­tion­ably true, it will still be uncer­tain whether this sense was intend­ed by the sacred writer when he used the words quot­ed above, or whether he meant some­thing else no less true.

St. Augus­tine, then, is one of the dread­ed Neville Cham­ber­lain school of appeasers. Sci­ence tells true things about the mate­r­i­al world, and scrip­ture can­not over­turn the clear evi­dence of the world. Scrip­ture, as he and oth­er bas­tions of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion inter­pret it, does not address these mate­r­i­al, sci­en­tif­ic ques­tions. It address­es issues of faith.

Reli­gious sci­en­tists have tra­di­tion­al­ly seen their work in the same light, as elu­ci­dat­ing how God had worked. Such state­ments can be found in New­ton’s writ­ing, and a relat­ed sen­ti­ment can even be found in Ein­stein’s com­ments, though his reli­gion bore lit­tle resem­blance to Newton’s. 

Intel­li­gent design makes a mock­ery of that long reli­gious tra­di­tion, a tra­di­tion stretch­ing square­ly into the Jew­ish Bible. Insert­ing the Fly­ing Spaghet­ti Mon­ster, nood­ly appendages and all, into the Sis­tine Chapel’s ceil­ing is no more a mock­ery of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion than ID’s approach, which places God into a com­fort­ably small test tube.