The point is that when "Man of Steel" kindly asks that you look into who was/is this Jesus Christ guy and what he did/does, it is not the same as looking into the "Spaghetti Monster" or the "Great Gnome" as you suggested.
And to answer avxo's challenge to find "proof" that the "Christian God" exists, I believe this is not a matter of proof. I have always believed that it is a matter of faith. When it comes to seeing evidence, it is a personal matter. For example, I see plenty of evidence that support my faith, but to you it is no evidence at all.
But for the sake of the discussion, I will play along: Christianity grew exponentially in the first few centuries, peacefully, and despite the fact that Christians were being persecuted, tortured and killed. I happen to know a college professor who said that to him personally, this is evidence enough that Jesus' disciples, after watching him die, after scattering and hiding in fear for their own lives, later saw Jesus Christ alive again. To this professor, that is evidence enough of the resurrection. The disciples all died poor, powerless, and most died violent deaths. Who would die for a lie? And why?
Anyway, I'm curious, how would you tell this professor that the above applies just the same and proves that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists?
Thank you for your continued responses.
1. Man of Steel asked us to ignore evidence and reason and instead engage in a "switch [of] gears and opt for a reversed, emotional position" so that we might discover Christianity's truth.
This type of appeal is exactly equivalent to my appeal that you submit yourself to the Almighty Gnome, as I simply replaced the Christian terms in Steel's post with my own. Think of this in terms of a game: we are both trying to convince a reasonable person from another planet that our worldview is the right one. After hearing both of our pleas, our galactic visitor will have no more evidence for the Christian God than he will the Almighty Gnome. In short, this sort of reasoning is terrible and isn't going to convince someone with no skin in the game of anything (nor should it).
2. I agree that Jesus and the Almighty Gnome are not logically equivalent; Jesus actually existed and the Almighty Gnome never did. So, there will be arguments in favor of the former that cannot be made in favor of the latter. The point of Spaghetti and Gnome talk is to make clear that certain types of argument many Christians make in favor of their religion apply equally well to the other religions men have invented, including contemporary, satirical ones.
3. So, there is a class of arguments Christians make that aren't exclusive evidence for Christianity (e.g., faith-based arguments and emotional appeals like the ones discussed in 1.), and then there are arguments that can be said to be exclusive to Christianity. Unfortunately, I just can't see where any of these arguments have any force. I'm glad you mention evidence, because standards of evidence have a role to play in deciding our worldview. My standards of evidence are such that none of the supposed evidence for Christianity counts as such. You say that "seeing evidence" is a personal matter, and to some extent this is right: our personal psychology can very much affect our interpretation of what counts as evidence and what does not.
4. However, there need to be objective standards of evidence, or principles that enable us to discover the way reality really is. I contend that the standards deployed by the religious lead to a silly body of beliefs that has little correspondence to the reality outside of our heads, as evinced by the endless pile of false predictions/explanations of observations. Imagine a counterfactual scenario where Jesus actually
did return in the lifetime of his followers, as he said he would. This would be a successful prediction of an observation and would be pretty compelling evidence that Christianity was right. Science makes these sorts of predictions and they come to fruition every second, e.g., when we continuously and correctly predict the motions and positions of planetary bodies. Christianity and all other human religions flunk this standard pretty handily, yet pretend to describe the world all the same.
5. When someone makes an argument, we can extract an "argument form" (or
type of argument) from their words and see if it makes sense. Your professor friend argues that because Christianity grew in the face of persecution, it must be true and the supernatural events it lays claim to must have happened. The "argument form" we can extract from is this: "Any set of beliefs that grows in the face of fierce persecution must be true. X [some set of beliefs] grew in the face of fierce persecution. Therefore, X is true."
It's pretty clear from history that this is a
terrible way to argue for a belief system and does not constitute the slightest evidence for Christianity whatsoever. Why not? One, because it applies to virtually every man-made religion in existence, all of whose disciples faced persecution in their foundational years. These religions make mutually incompatible claims, so they can't all be true. Two,
hundreds of millions of people have died for lies throughout human history, including all of the religious wars (even if we exclude Christianity) and deaths in the name of whacked-out, quasi-religious political systems (e.g., Communism). They died because they genuinely believed, just as I'm sure the disciples did. This isn't evidence for
what they believed, unless you want to count the fact that Al Qaeda operatives are willing to risk getting hunted down by the world's superpower and ultimately blowing themselves up, often as sexually repressed virgins, as evidence that Allah is talking to them and promising them virgins in heaven.