Why Teapots and Spaghetti Monsters Miss the Point

In connection with the topic of my preceding post, I just noticed a comment that David Tye had left on a previous post of mine about half-a-year ago. His comment is very insightful:

Flying spaghetti monsters and teapots are things immanent with respect to the universe. God - if He exists - is utterly transcendent. Proving the transcendent and proving the immanent are such radically different proposals that it is questionable whether the same word "proof" should be used in both cases. For a skeptic to blithely compare reflection on God's existence with reflection on the existence of a china teapot is to betray a gross misunderstanding of the categories of the discussion.

Every demonstration of the existence of God has the same form. The universe, the world, ourselves, or whatever is shown to be radically incomplete. It suffers from a lack of being in some respect or other. This lack of being points beyond itself to the fullness of being, in that being or ground of being that transcends the universe altogether. St. Thomas's Five Ways are variations on this theme.

Whether we buy the argument depends on two things. 1) Whether we accept that the universe suffers from the lack of being supposed, and 2) Whether we accept that the lack of being requires fulfillment in a transcendent being. Whatever our answer, atheist or theist, our basic stance with respect to the universe is called into question when the question of God arises. The question of God is one of the fundamental "limit" questions of philosophy, like the question of freedom. Not so with spaghetti monsters and teapots.

The spaghetti monster argument is not an answer to God, but evidence that the skeptic never understood the question.

A lot of people, including many atheists, mistakenly believe that the questions

• Does God exist?
• Does Zeus exist?
  
• Do dogs, cats, trees, rocks, quarks, etc. exist?
  
• Is there a celestial teapot floating in space between the orbits of Earth and Mars?
• Is there a Flying Spaghetti Monster?

are all questions about the internal constituents of the universe - whether it includes a being of such-and-such a sort. But the God question isn't like the others, for God, as such, cannot be just another constituent of the universe. Indeed, he can't be a constituent of the universe at all. Rather, if there is a God, he must be a transcendent ground of being, a necessary condition for the possibility of there being anything else. As David puts it, the existence of God is one of the fundamental limit questions of philosophy. It can't be confirmed or disconfirmed in the same way as the others - whether by direct observation or scientific experiment. Rather, it takes metaphysical argument employing substantive (and non-empirical) premises.

Moral: When some atheists say things like this:

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. (Stephen F Roberts)

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them. (Bertrand Russell)

they betray a misunderstanding of the issues. God, if he exists, is not and cannot be just one more deity, alongside the members of the ancient polytheistic pantheons.