In January 2005 the Kansas State Board of Education voted to allow intelligent design to be presented as a scientific alternative to evolution in public school science classes. Bobby Henderson, a twenty-four-year-old physics graduate of Oregon State University, wrote the board an open letter making a narrow, deliberately absurd argument: if a designer with no specified identity could count as a scientific hypothesis, so could his own designer, an invisible, undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster, and fairness required equal classroom time for both.
The letter's structure is a parody of intelligent design's own reasoning rather than a general attack on religion. Henderson accepted, for the sake of argument, every piece of evidence consistent with an old, evolved universe, and simply reassigned the cause: the Monster, he wrote, created the world to look old, and each new geological or fossil discovery is "a stunt to test our faith," touched by His Noodly Appendage. Pirates, in his account, were the Monster's original and most favored people, and he offered a graph showing global temperatures rising as the number of pirates worldwide declined, correlation standing in for causation exactly as he argued intelligent design's own case did.
The board never responded. Henderson posted the letter to his own website in May 2005; it spread by email and blog faster than any single outlet drove it, and within months "Pastafarian" had become a real, if self-consciously joking, identity that thousands of people adopted for themselves, a spread the letter's narrow original argument never anticipated or requested.