Spotted yesterday on Bellevue Place: a chrome-effect car badge combining the ancient Alpha or icthus symbol of Christianity with feet and the surname of a famous Edinburgh medical student.
This correspondent at first thought it was intended to express a mature compromise between faith in the Almighty and acceptance of Evolution. Not so. A frothing atheist friend soon asserted that the badge is intended as a humourous but firm rebuttal of religious faith in general and Intelligent Design in particular.
The badge is sold in the UK by a Somerset-based firm called – not unreasonably – Darwin Fish. They claim to be pro-evolution rather than anti-religious or anti-Christian, but include in their range a Flying Spaghetti Monster with controversial origins in the USA.[img_assist|nid=1927|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=101]
Here, in 2005, a physics graduate called Bobby Henderson penned a satirical protest against the Kansas State Board of Education's decision to allow Intelligent Design to be taught as an alternative to Evolution in state schools. In an open letter, he professed to believe in a supernatural Creator resembling spaghetti and meatballs, and demanded that this belief be accorded equal teaching time to Evolution and Intelligent Design in public classrooms.
He later elaborated his 'Pastafarian' theories in The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (2006), asserting that global warming was the result of a worldwide decline in the numbers of pirates.
Spurtle readers of a philosophical bent will doubtless be reminded of Bertrand Russell's Celestial Teapot in 'Is There a God?' (1952):[img_assist|nid=1928|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=186]
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
Spurtle's frothing atheist friend is a great admirer of Richard Dawkins. Personally, never having met the fellow, I reserve judgement as to his existence.