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aka the Great Spaghetti Monster.
I've heard of people comparing God to the flying spaghettis monster, but such comparisons are simply to mock the faith of others and is intellectually dishonest.
There is no evidence for the flying pasta, but there certainly is for those who believe in the God of the Bible. Faith is not blind.
The evidence in my opinion is overwhelming that the God of the Bible is real. In fact, pretty most all faiths in the world derive their faith from the God of the Bible. The rest of the faiths out there, recognize Christ as God inspired. There is no other religious figure that is recognized as such..
Those that discount the Bible as a myth, discount Biblical Archeology that brings the stories of the Bible to life. These folks actually lived. And the prophesies, I think the most influential on me are Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9:24-27.
In both Daniel and Isaiah, you have prophetic works that date will before the time of Christ, yet both are actuate predictions about his life. In fact, reading Isaiah 53 is like reading a chapter from the gospels it is so spot on describing the life of Christ. At best, you could argue that the writers of the NT simply made up the story of the life of Jesus to match the prophesy of Isaiah. But if you do, you are left with a very troubling aspect of Isaiah 53. It is the only scripture where God sets out to destroy the life of a righteous man. Why? All other accounts of God allowing harm on people is to judge their sin, so this case is special. The cross was prophesied thousands of years prior.
But Daniel 9 is the kicker, for here you have an actual calendar for the coming of Christ. At best, you could argue that the writers of the NT simply made up when Jesus walked the earth to match the prophesy. Nonetheless, the calendar is astounding to me, and those who have verified that it points to Christ are none other than Jewish rabbis who deny Jesus as their Messiah as they wrote about it in the Talmud. Think of it, the very people whose interest would be to calculate the prophesy to another time to discount the coming of Jesus as Messiah have recognized that their Messiah should have come when Jesus did come. Their explanation is that the sinfulness of Israel caused the Messiah to tarry. But prophesy strikes again as it was predicted that the Jewish people would reject their Messiah.
And there is simply the evidence of how scripture speaks to people. Reading it I feel connected to truth. As Jesus once asked his disciples after teaching them a hard to embrace idea, will you continue to follow me as people begin to walk away? The disciples retorted, to whom shall we go since you have the words of life. The draw is intangible, unexplainable, as the love generated from reading the scriptures is comparable to how you fall in love with a life partner. How can you explain love?
I realize many feel that God is not interested in our affairs simply because humanity has become disconnected with God and we experience suffering. But if God is uninterested in our suffering, then such a God may as well be dead to us even though he may exist.
The God of the Bible came to earth to suffer as we do, to live and bleed with us, and to save us. This is a God worthy of our love and attention, even though the sufferings we experience may make it feel the opposite.
But as I pray for things that don't come to pass, I'm often reminded of Christ praying before going to the cross, asking the Father to spare him the fate of going to the cross as he began to sweat blood due to the stress. He got no answer. Imagine, God seemed to abandon him even as his own followers began to abandon him so that they would hot suffer the same fate as he. I can't imagine a worse feeling.
For whatever reason, we are often asked to walk over the hot coals in faith despite the suffering.
But that is why it is a faith. If it were all explainable, if it were all easy, there would be no faith. Faith is simply acknowledging our need for an all knowing and powerful God. Faith allows us to believe in things we may not be able to comprehend or things we are not privy to. Either way, faith is the only possible relationship to a finite creation to an infinite God, much like a parent and child.
