I recently had a conversation/debate with someone who said he believed strongly in God. Not the Catholic God, not Allah (he's a lapsed Catholic) but his own, personal concept of a god that he was sure explained the creation of the universe better than any natural process possibly could. Due to the late hour and too much alcohol the conversation eventually went off topic and finally degenerated into broad merriment, but the subject of the conversation has been on my mind and is something I've been thinking about, which lead me to the question - what do people mean when they talk about "God"?
(Of course, this is a topic that deserves much more time and energy than I'm giving it here, but these are just some quick thoughts I'm putting down as a distraction from work, so bear with me.)
When people say they believe in God, generally there is a very specific God they're referring to, one who often appeared first in a holy book, or who is the central figure of a major organized religion. But occasionally you hear people refer to personal, new age, generic version of "God" they believe in. It's not the God of the Bible or Koran or the gods of the Bhagavad Gita, of course, because religion is just a cultural construct and God exists beyond any sort of man-made organization or human thought. Et cetera.
But here's the thing that people need to keep in mind, whether they think a god exists or not: God is a cultural construct. He does not exist outside of nature, or as part of nature - God "exists" as much as he is a character in a book (or several books), and the "God" that people either do or don't believe in today can only be a specific God whose characteristics and history were written down and created by a particular culture as a product of a particular time and place. For a person to say she believes in a God that transcends all of this is to say she believes in a God as artificial and created as the gods of those ancient peoples she so correctly rejects. The only difference is that, in this case, she's the one doing the creating. A god produced from one individual's mind does not make that god any more real than Yahweh and his associates/rivals.
If you want evidence of the existence of a god, you have to find that evidence outside of your own head. Logic and arguments (ie, language) will never be sufficient, anymore than Darwin's Origin of Species on its own was sufficient to make the case for evolution - the evidence for evolution is out there, in the real world, inviting skeptics and the curious alike to go observe it for themselves. You'll find no such equivalent when it comes to God.
The nature of God is not understood in any universal way, even by believers in gods like those with the bestselling holy books. That in itself should raise eyebrows - if there's not universal agreement on the nature of God, then either one religion is right and the rest are wrong, or they're all wrong. But God, being a cultural artifact, of course, doesn't actually exist, s impossible for any one person to actually know. If they claim to, they're making it up.
(Title of this post taken from a book title referred to in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
