Today’s devotional: who’s afraid of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
If you’ve spent time interacting with atheists in person or online, you have probably heard of the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.” The Flying Spaghetti Monster is an intentionally ludicrous imaginary creature that is used to challenge believers with the apparent irrationality of their belief in God. “How does believing in God make any more sense than believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster?” goes the question.
Although the imaginary is silly, it isn’t easy to know how to respond to this challenge. Is this a fair objection to Christianity? Is it really any more reasonable to believe in an unseen, all-powerful God than it is to believe in aliens, fairies, or airborne pasta beasts?
In this Slice of Infinity devotional, Jill Carattini offers a serious response to the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument:
Where the Flying Spaghetti Monster attempts to shake belief and dissuade certainty, it holds no power as an analogy for belief in God because it misses the very heart of why so many people intuitively believe. This was illustrated recently in a debate between Richard Dawkins and Christian mathematician John Lennox. Dawkins referenced the illustration of a person walking through a forest and finding a beautiful garden. He asked, “Isn’t it enough to appreciate the beauty of the garden without having to believe in invisible fairies hiding behind the flowers?” Lennox’s reply demonstrated the fallacy in this analogy. He said, “Of course you wouldn’t have to believe in fairies in the garden, but you would assume there was a gardener, wouldn’t you?” You would believe in a gardener even without seeing him or her because it is the only way to make sense of a garden. Otherwise, how would you distinguish between the garden and the rest of the forest you were walking through? A garden is only a garden if it was planted and cared for on purpose. The God of the Bible is not comparable to any of the funny invisible internet deities, but He is quite like the gardener. He makes sense of the world and He assures us that we are not here by accident, but that we were created on purpose and for a purpose.
Do you find this rebuttal convincing? How do you respond when the Flying Spaghetti Monster is invoked in discussions with atheists?
I simply know, intuitively, that God exists and is working for my good because I exist and there is a tangible world that I can touch and work with and communicate in.
The Universe is too orderly, too well-designed, to be just a large cosmic “random happening.” When God opens one’s eyes, then the beauty of His plan and purpose is revealed. As long as one goes through life believing that he or she is the most important part of his or her life, denying God His rightful credit and place, they will not see creation for what it is.
I love the analogy of the unseen gardener who created the garden in the forest. The mere fact that the garden exists is proof that someone lovingly and painstakingly made it. It did not just happen, nor did it will itself into being.
The Big Bang Theory might have a lot of factual evidence, but it does not satisfactorily explain A. — Who put that immensely dense ball of matter there to explode in the first place? and B. — Who made the immeasurable space in which the Universe resides?
They can prove the Big Bang happened, but that does not answer why it is here.
If there is no God, then there is no reason for anything to exist and there is no right or wrong.
But since there is a God, we know that Love is the purpose. Love makes right and wrong.
Why I believe…..answer to an Athiest…….
As a scientist, I can verify that, yes, we can and do EXPLAIN the concepts as we learn them from the universe, thus as science increases we may be able to understand the “how” in “how was it made.”
However, anyone who is so sure that there is no God, may I simply ask you to go and spend some time getting a basic understanding of physiology (that is, the science of the body), and biochemistry.
In the moment that I understood the details of how each and every piece of the body somehow managed to develop in a way that required each piece to be dependant upon each other, I was absolutely convinced that there is a “God,” especially given today’s theory that things like mitochondria(our energy releasers in the cell) were likely independant organisms which we coexisted with. Add that to all of these very disparate and complex reactions; the trillions and trillions of interconnected reactions over broad areas of the body (take the endocrine system, which is your hormones.Just one of these hundreds of thousands of CYCLES for example, take clues from the sunlight as to how to regulate sleep and wake cycles and other such things.
Imagine, the sun is ‘detected’ by the body, interpreted (where is that subprogram reside, by the way?), a first message is sent to a feedback system via the blood that then creates the next increase or decrease of specific hormones (which themselves are created by entire other interconnected subprograms and on-time delivered to the cells), which in turn causes another hormone, whose affect then relays back to the brain itself, whereby you “feel” more or less tired, depending upon the season (especially in Northern countries).
So, when we can entirely ‘reverse engineer’ the body (if we CAN), does this mean that because it is explained the ‘nobody’ made it? For those of you who believe that it all came from one big boom, great….maybe it DID. Maybe that was what was the energy method as GOD (creator)used his infinite knowledge to create something out of nothing. Until we can do that all on our own, we have not found, nor become, God.
PS…..think matter organizes itself simply through chaos? fine. leave your house dirty for a million years and see what amazing ‘complex’ beings you create….i for one have never had the experience of something broken apart coming together on its own without the aid of some sort of energy. believe me, i hate housework, i’ve tried 😛
Finally…..we now know how a baby is born, how to put one together in a jar, how to put one in the womb from there and deliver out to the world. Did ‘we’ create that baby? Well, as a mom of 3 I can sure as heck tell you that I had NO conscious partaking in their growth or development. What is the push, for example, for growth in the first place? It is not necessarily biologically “needed” by either gender; you won’t die if you don’t have sex, but of course, the species dies out if you do not. Just because we understand the mechanism doesn’t deny, but rather, prove, the hand of intelligent design. My God, and my choice to choose to refer to him through Jesus,and for me, is that same creator. I suspect this same “God”/”Allah”/Creator are simply cultural terms for the same One. Each of us, despite the name, all believe that we can commune with the original designer/creator/owner/administrator and He is the same being we all mean when we say “the One,” in our own languages and in terms of our history. I make the choice then, after further research, to determine that in my opinion, Jesus, WAS ‘created’ in the womb to give us help trying to learn to navigate these laws, which we do not yet know, but which we somehow work with (likely energetically) everyday. Think gravity,microwave, radiation, electomagnetism. What other processes have we not yet ‘discovered’ and thus learn how to interact in a physical way.
Now whether or not there is special protection (salvation) is not the issue; that’s my belief, based upon my very well researched and experienced decision. Whether or not you choose to believe it is through Jesus is your decision, although I can give you some arguments why it is a very useful way to understand the interface between science (man) and God.
As I believe that all are created by the same creator, loved by the same creator, then I believe that we will work best with that “power” (aka all the powers discovered and yet undiscovered) the more that we care for each other. If you take the analogy of the body further, you can see how the health and welfare of one affects the health and welfare of all.
May you find the peace and love of Yahweh.
I’m genuinely surprised that Richard Dawkins would use such a weak illustration and it suggests to me that he must have been more interested in insulting John Lennox than debating. Of course, not being there and having not seen it, I can’t say for certain, but it does sound like the argument of someone losing a debate.