I posted something ridiculous the other day about Big Foot. I said, “What if Big Foot is real and we’re all just part of his dream?”
It’s an absurd statement. But such a thing has often been used by atheist to disprove Christianity. It’s better known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument. After all how can you disprove that the world wasn’t created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster? And so why not give an equal hearing in classrooms to this particular teaching? Adherents would say such a thing is just as valid as Intelligent Design.
But this is not a valid argument. Let me explain.
I believe that I am real and I am relatively certain that Big Foot only survives in monster truck form. Or to put that negatively I do not believe that I am just a figment of Bigfoot’s imagination.
Now it is possible that I am wrong. I cannot disprove this ridiculous assertion. But just because I cannot disprove this—or disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster—it does not make it necessarily true that I am wrong. And yes, you can turn this on the believer as well. It cannot be definitively disproven that the God of the Bible actually exists.
I like what Paul Copan says on this:
The skeptic has to do more than suggest the possibility that I’m wrong; he must give reasons for believing I’m wrong in this particular instance. The skeptic wrongly thinks he must be refuted first before we can claim to know. But we can seek, with God’s help, to rebut the skeptic by saying, “You haven’t convincingly shown that I’m wrong.” Why think we have to bear the burden by showing that the skeptic’s position is false?
That ridiculous thought on Big Foot is able to survive in our day because we have lost the ability to understand that there are differing degrees of belief. Think Mythbusters. Some things are busted, plausible, and confirmed. But in our day and age if something cannot be absolutely proven then it finds itself in the land of misfit beliefs along with ridiculous notions about Big Foot.
This is why so many folks believe that the only things which are actually true are those which can be observed by science. (Oddly enough a belief which cannot be observed by science). The result of this, as stated earlier, is that there is no way to differentiate between really ludicrous things and things which are quite plausible.
Yes, it is true that I could quite possibly be all part of Bigfoot’s dream. But certainly such a thing isn’t quite as plausible as the idea that these desires and such within my heart are evidence of something much greater than mere evolutionary process.
I’m not staking my soul on something as ridiculous as a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I’m staking my soul on the real verifiable claims of a man named Jesus who was raised from the dead. Yes, I’m staking my soul on the world’s most falsifiable religion. You find a bag of bones in Jerusalem and Christianity will fall out of the category of plausible and into the dumpster heap of all things busted. In the same way when my King comes on the clouds and judges the living and the dead at that moment it’ll move from plausible into the land of confirmed.
—
Photo source: here
