No Flying Spaghetti Monster

New Atheists and other critics of religion typically operate with a highly anthropomorphic conception of God. They realize that theists regard God as immaterial, but they nevertheless think of him as essentially a disembodied person, like us but without having the limitations we have on our power, knowledge, and moral virtue. They then proceed to argue that to deny that God so conceived exists is really no different from denying that Zeus, or Quetzalcoatl, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. For like the material world God is supposed to be the explanation of, God so conceived would require an explanation of his own. For example, he would be an extremely complex mind, and so we’d need to ask what it is that accounts for why this mind exists. Since this just pushes the problem of ultimate explanation back a stage without solving it, Ockham’s razor — so the argument goes — should lead us just to reject theism and stick with the fundamental laws of physics as the ultimate explanation. In fact, Dawkins characterizes this in The God Delusion as the main argument against theism, and many other atheists and secularists would say the same.

Now the trouble with this argument is that it simply misses the entire point of classical philosophical theology. God as conceived of in classical theology is not complex but rather absolutely simple. He is not “a being” alongside other beings but rather Being Itself; nor is he “a mind” alongside other minds, but pure Intellect Itself.