{"id":66,"date":"2007-10-02T14:59:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-02T18:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/?p=66"},"modified":"2007-10-02T14:59:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-02T18:59:00","slug":"why-teapots-and-spaghetti-monsters-miss-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/2007\/10\/why-teapots-and-spaghetti-monsters-miss-the-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Teapots and Spaghetti Monsters Miss the Point"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The spaghetti monster argument is not an answer to God, but evidence that the skeptic never understood the question.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A lot of people, including many atheists, mistakenly believe that the questions<\/p>\n