Spaghetti Is a Delicious Part of the Space-Time Universe

It is often assumed by atheists that the burden of proof is on Christians. You can’t just posit anything, they say, much less an undetectable omnipotent Creator who has existed from all eternity. You might as well say that the flying spaghetti monster created the world.

When it comes to a creator however, notice that Christians aren’t just positing anything, especially not something akin to an undetectable flying spaghetti monster. The Bible teaches “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So there was a “beginning,” which is a time word, when physical matter also came into existence and thus space as well.

Interestingly enough the big bang cosmology also affirms that the universe had a beginning. The cosmos began when an infinitely dense singularity expanded into the space-time, material universe that we now inhabit. It did not happen on the time-line but began the time-line. It did not happen while the clock was ticking but started it ticking. It didn’t happen in space but it’s expansion created space. Prior to this the laws of physics didn’t exist, as they require the material universe in order to have something to govern.

So Christians aren't positing something that's undetectable or unfalsifiable. The Bible and the best science we have right now says that time, space, and matter (i.e. the universe) all had a beginning. We are positing that since time had a beginning, whatever brought it into existence is timeless. Since matter had a beginning, whatever brought it into existence is immaterial or spirit. Since space had a beginning whatever brought it into existence is omnipresent. An eternal, omnipresent, spirit – these are the attributes of the Christian God: "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse (Romans 1:20 ESV). I would argue that the burden of proof is on those who would deny this God’s existence. The late Nasa scientist Robert Jastrow would seem to agree:

Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.  

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. 

Flying spaghetti monster? I don’t think so, since spaghetti is part of the space-time universe. Calling it it an undetectable flying spaghetti monster is an oxymoron as spaghetti is delicious.

"The Heavenly Chariot Flies Thundering Through the Ages"

This summer I picked up Ian Ker's G. K. Chesterton: A Bio again. Modernists  and now post-modernists have always questioned whether the church got it right. Maybe the heretics were the good guys who got squashed by the powerful. The problem with this is that Jesus promised that the gates of hell would never prevail against the church. Chesterton compared the church to a tree that changes around the edges of a solid middle but the modernist is like a cloud always shifting with winds of change. No one has probably ever described the hair plastering adventure of orthodoxy quite so well:

People have fallen into the foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.... It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.... She [the Church] swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles.... The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.... It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.... To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. 

Fix the Morals

If morals evolve, they keep evolving. There is no fixed moral code if evolution is the explanation of all of reality.

Mind and Body Democracy

I've started reading James K. A. Smith's Imagining the Kingdom, which is a follow up to his Desiring the Kingdom. He succinctly summarizes his previous book in response to his critics:

The argument of Desiring the Kingdom  is not that we need less than worldview, but more: Christian education will only be fully an education to the extent that it is also a formation of our habits. And such formation happens not only, or even primarily, by equipping the intellect but through the repetitive formation of embodied, communal practices. And the "core" of those formative practices is centered in the practices of Christian worship (10).

Smith argues that "the way to the heart is through the body and the way to the body is through story" (14). Smith seems to be arguing against the primacy of the intellect, and for the primacy of the body.

He maintains that we don't merely have a body but we are a body. I think Smith means that we are a body but not merely a body. If we were merely a body we would lose our identity when we die. Death is the unnatural separation of body and soul. We continue in our personal identity after the body is laid down but this unnatural state is remedied by the resurrection.

Smith's emphasis is well taken but we need to remember that when God breathed into us we became a living soul. In other words, God prepared a body to be united to the soul, but the soul itself animates the body. In this way, the soul can continue to preserve the human self separate from the body.

Instead of arguing for the primacy of the mind or the primacy of the body in forming the heart, I think we need to see the mind and body in a democracy. They are united in the image of God and both play an equal role in forming the heart. The intellectual tends to underestimate the body and the hedonist underestimates the mind.