A Brief Rebuttal to "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" Free Reprint Article

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A Brief Rebuttal to "The Flying Spaghetti Monster"

by James Barringer
7/15/2010 / Christian Apologetics

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I have not read the entire book "The Flying Spaghetti Monster," nor am I likely to. Also in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I laughed quite a bit at the parts of the book that I did read. I love a good satire as much as anybody. However, I think that the entire book is founded on a gigantic failure of logic. The author, Bobby Henderson, bases his critique of religion around the idea that it seems absurd and can be easily mocked. However, this does not prove that it is absurd, or that it should be mocked. In my rebuttal, I would like to point out that many of the most absurd things about life are actually true, and it is the "obvious" or "common-sensical" things about life which are most frequently false.

For example, what if I told you that there is a certain animal which deliberately wraps itself into a giant shroud, stays there for an extended time, and emerges later as a completely different animal with the ability to fly? You would probably accuse me of making up a myth - unless you happened to know of the caterpillar. Or what if I told you that there is a species of fish which has an inexplicable need to swim upstream, to a place it has never been, for the purpose of laying its eggs? "That's ridiculous," you say. "How can it successfully navigate to a place it's never been before? How does it even know it needs to go there?" That would be a perfectly natural response, and remains a perfectly valid question unanswered and possibly unanswerable by science - except that the salmon actually does it. Lastly, what if I told you that huge flocks of birds do the same thing as the salmon: somehow the birds know the time of year when winter is coming, so they fly south (somehow they know which way is south) in a giant V-formation, because somehow they know instinctively that flying in a V conserves energy and lets them fly much more easily. "Thoroughly absurd," you say. "How can a bird understand physics like that?" Yet look up in the sky any autumn and you will find the birds flying south - and then look again in the spring and you will find them flying north again, somehow able to navigate back to precisely where they came from, with brains the size of walnuts. Absurd...but completely true.

Next we must look at the things which seem completely obvious to us but are actually untrue. For example, everybody who has ever looked at the night sky knows that the moon gives off light. Sometimes it's so bright I can even see my shadow by it - except that it actually doesn't give off light at all. It is merely made of a special kind of rock that reflects light from the sun. Similarly, all you have to do is look at the sky in order to know that the sun moves across it. "What do you mean the sun doesn't move?" you ask. "Just look at it. It's obviously further to the west than it was four hours ago. How can you say it does not move?" Yet it doesn't. (It was Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus - a trio of Christians - who were instrumental in proving this.)

The examples of the previous paragraph may be extreme, and it is true that we no longer believe those things because we know better. That is not the point, nor is it even relevant. The point is that those things seem plain as day to the ignorant and uninformed, and it requires the addition of extra knowledge - which itself often seems absurd and counterintuitive, as with the caterpillar or salmon - to say that the "obvious" thing is untrue and the "absurd" thing actually is true.

This is why I am not troubled when people like Bobby Henderson critique Christianity for being absurd. The truth often looks absurd to those who don't know any better. And, if we look at the universe that actually exists, we find that the unpredictable and seemingly absurd are true far more frequently than the things that seem obvious.

Bobby's other critique of Christianity, that there is no observable evidence for it, is also laughable. This deserves another whole essay (I won't dignify his book with that much time and effort) but I have written very extensively in the past about the historical proofs for Jesus and the reliability of the gospels, and I find it is almost to the point where a person has to be willfully ignorant to disbelieve the gospels in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Additionally, science has disproved many religions' claims about natural phenomena: thunder is not Thor banging his hammer, for instance. It has never been able to touch any of the claims of Christianity. The book of Job says that the earth is "suspended on nothing," an audacious scientific claim from an age where preeminent secular thinkers honestly believed that the earth was suspended on the back of a tortoise. Simply by taking the Bible's claims of truth (especially in the areas of science and history), and matching them with what we know to be true, we conclude that the Bible is a truthful and reliable document, which leads us to believe that it is most probably reliable on all issues of which it speaks, even those which cannot be empirically verified. Our inability to determine the existence of God with our senses proves only that our senses are limited; it says nothing whatsoever about whether God exists. Indeed, our inability to verify him empirically is the whole reason that a document such as the Bible exists: to communicate to us, from outside our own experiences, things which are true but which we could never know if not told - unless you learned, from some source outside yourself, who the first President was, you would have no way of knowing, because you cannot use your empirical senses to determine this merely by looking at the universe.

So again, I am not particularly troubled by the satire of "The Flying Spaghetti Monster." I think he has failed in his basic premise: to demonstrate that, simply because something seems absurd and can be mocked, that it is absurd or should be mocked. This is not to say there are no legitimate criticisms of Christianity; Henderson himself brings one to light, when the Spaghetti Monster commands humanity not to build multi-million dollar shrines to him since they could use that money to help the poor instead. But here we see the problem: "Spaghetti Monster" provides no compelling reason why I should even want to help the poor. Christianity does, by teaching that God made us all in his own image, that we're all precious to him, and that we owe it to our fellow humans to treat them the same way we would treat God. I could go on, of course, but I feel that the point has been made. "Spaghetti Monster" is a satire, and not a particularly good one at that; although it is quite funny, it is merely the product of one more college student who thinks that he has discovered something devastating to Christianity. Billions of these people have lived and died, while the faith lives on.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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