The Flying Spaghetti Monster

“Another thing: Many atheists seem to relish using the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Invisible Pink Unicorn Argument to say you can't prove a Universal Negative and therefore God is on the same level as FSM and IPU. Ergo you can't prove God exists because you have no evidence for Him and so He doesn't exist because He is not real. How logical or strong is this argument and how can an intelligent Christian refute it for good?”

This argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Even so, it is interesting to think about. We’ll approach it from a couple angles.

I deny that God is invisible in the same way as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. There are different kinds of invisibility. Numbers are not invisible in the same way unicorns are; gravity is not invisible in the same way as a Superman’s x-ray vision; the memory of what you actually did yesterday is not invisible in the same way as your memory of the dream you had about what you did yesterday. Likewise you can speak through silence (as when Abraham spoke by excluding crucial information from Isaac), or you can just be ignorant through silence (as when a teacher asks you a hard question and you don’t have the foggiest idea of a good answer). The invisibility and silence of God are not the same thing as the invisibility and silence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Now let’s evaluate the claims of these invisible things by story-metaphor.

If you were an ambassador to an important king and he sent you to a foreign country, when you got there, how would you expect them to treat you? Now suppose a counterfeit ambassador came and said he was the true one, but his hair looked like spaghetti (to imitate what he thought the king looked like), and he claimed the true king claimed he was a flying monster.

Do you think there would be an easy way for people to distinguish between your very different claims? And supposing the people were all really slow and couldn’t tell the difference; are you still the ambassador of the true king, even if they don’t believe you? What if some people look at you, then at the FSM representative, then at you, then back at him, and are really confused and finally conclude that they are agnostics about the existence of your king, because after all, if people claim different things then nobody is right, and everyone is just as right as everyone else. Does your king exist, even if they don’t believe it? Is he the true king, even if someone makes ridiculous claims about a Spaghetti King? And if people wanted proof from you, wouldn’t they just ask both of you for your credentials, or for the royal seal?

Two ideas in this story: 1) There is an essential distinction we should keep in mind between epistemology (what we can know, and how we go about knowing it) and ontology (what actually is). You can have a loaded gun to my head and I can declare that there are no bullets in it, but if you pull the trigger and there really are bullets, well, my unbelief didn’t help my case very much.

This may sound funny, but the reason the Pink Unicorn Argument is no good, whereas the claim that the God of the Scriptures is the true God is very good, is that the one is false (ridiculously false in this case, but it doesn’t have to be ridiculous to fit this category, only false), and the other is true. Since he is true, regardless of any of us or any of our beliefs, the claim that he exists and rules the universe is a true claim, even if there is not a bit of evidence behind it. Think about it: he is God, we are people; let God be true and every man a liar.

But he has not left himself without testimony, and this is where the second idea of the story comes in. The idea in my own thinking came from reading a philosopher named Charles Peirce (pronounced “purse”). He called it “abduction,” but though brilliant he was notoriously bad at finding good names for his ideas. It can also be called “inference to the best explanation,” and this captures the basic idea a lot better.

If you hear a knock knock at the door, it is possible that an alien has come and is using the wood of the door for an experiment in earthly substances; it is also possible two birds have accidentally flown into your door in sequence; possibly someone snuck into your house at night and planted a digital recorder of someone knocking, set to go off at an appointed time. Or maybe someone is at the door. While any of these is possible, based on past experience it seems that the person at the door is the explanation that explains the situation in the most likely way.

But we don’t stop there. We test the theory by going to the door to see if anyone is there. We could try to save one of the other theories, even if someone is in fact there, but pretty quickly this starts to look more like we have a secret agenda, or are just weird in the head (can’t think properly). Before we go the door, the best hypothesis is that there is a person at the door.

Notice that it isn’t really a question of evidence; several theories could explain the evidence in very different ways. It is a question of hypothesis, or of inference to the best explanation. There are some rules we can follow to figure out which types of explanations usually work best, but each situation must be individually evaluated. The person who follows the rules too strictly and never allows for variation will be especially vulnerable to pranks; the person who follows them too loosely will be vulnerable to conspiracy theories.

Now multiply the kinds of data available in this little scenario by the number of atoms in the universe, and then you will see the kinds of hints God has given for his existence. No, he hasn’t allowed us to open the door and look him face to face, but he has not left himself without testimony. Notice the verbs of Psalm 19:1-6: they are not passive; the universe does not easily acquiesce to multiple interpretations. There are a bunch of good books out now that highlight the hints given from the universe.

And then notice what follows in vv. 7-14. Christians can look at the universe for confirmation of our theory, to see which is the inference to the best explanation (as a non-Christian might), but we also have the word of the king that our message is true, that we are true ambassadors, and the guy over there who looks like spaghetti is a very poor liar.