Ross Douthat argues that the Flying Spaghetti Monster fails to provide a parallel to Christian faith and tradition.
Both the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Bertrand Russell’s teapot in space make a great deal of sense, Douthat says,
if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is.
As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection […] has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship.
The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God […], rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts.
Like Douthat, I tend to think the strongest argument for religious faith is the subjective one: i.e., an argument rooted in the subjective experience of millions of people living in diverse societies and spanning vast epochs of human history.
Moreover, Douthat is right: the Flying Spaghetti Monster misses that aspect of the equation entirely. It could only be devised by people who have made no effort to look at things sympathetically: i.e., from within the perspective of the people with whom they disagree.
