Topics Religion

Question From reading your site regularly, it sounds like many people confound the question, "does God exist?" with a different question, "does a particular kind of God exist?" From what I understand of quantum physics, everything is connected to some extent. The sum total off all interconnections among all energy and matter in the universe(s) could easily be an identity for a natural and holistic "God" that not only seems to "exist," but also seems NECESSARILY to exist. Yet this "God" would be unsatisfying to many since it/she/he would have very little interest in human beings and their day-to-day lives. Many of the arguments that so-called "atheists" make seem to come across more like "I don't like your particular version of God," and not at all an argument that "no God of any kind exists." It seems to me that the latter proposition: "no God of any kind exists" is just as unprovable and just as unverifiable as the argument that "God does exist, we just don't know how or in what form."

Accepted:
June 5, 2015

Comments

A very insightful point of

A very insightful point of view! As a panelist who has responded to lots of "God questions" on this site and who has published a bit in philosophy of religion, my overall impression is that when most users of this site (and here please note I may be off base) have theism in mind when they ask 'Does God exist?' or raise questions about the implications of the existence (or non-existence of God). Theistic views of God (for the most part) understand God to be the all powerful, all knowing, omnipresent, essentially (that is, necessarily) good, everlasting or eternal (that is, either God is outside of time or in time and without temporal origin or end), necessarily existing (that is, God has aseity or self-existence and does not exist due to the power of another being) Creator and sustainer of the cosmos. This is (roughly) how God is conceived of in traditional Judaism, Christianity, Islam and in theistic forms of Hinduism. But there are lots of particular further beliefs about God that are not shared in these traditions (God is Triune and Incarnate in Christianity, not so in Judaism and Islam) and there are philosophical and religious concepts of God that are also divergent. It sounds as though your concept of God (or the divine) is akin to God as conceived of by Spinoza. To go right to your point: you are correct, someone might well reject a theistic concept of God or the divine but accept a different philosophy of God.

Perhaps two further points are worth considering: You refer to the (or an) atheist as claiming "I don't like your particular version of God." There is an interesting difference between atheists who do adopt that attitude. Thomas Nagel might be in that category as he has claimed that he hopes God does not exist, but there are some atheist, like Michael Tooley, who have taken the opposite position. Tooley (who has argued for atheism in many contexts) has said he wishes God did exist or (putting things slightly differently) he would prefer it if God (as conceived of theistically as an all good being, etc) exists rather than not exists.

Second, a large part of theistic tradition sees God as described earlier, but adds that God is unique or sui generus and not simply one of a kind. On this view the term "God" is not like the term for a genus or species --as in "human being." If we take that seriously (and perhaps we do not have to) we might better refer, not to different Gods or alternative concepts of God, but to different concepts of (for example) Ultimate Reality. John Schellenberg has been moving (philosophically) in this direction developing a view he sometimes calls Ultimism, according to which we might be better served investigating different concepts of what is ultimate in reality (for some of us this may mean investigating the God of theism, but in your case it may mean investigating God as conceived of by Spinoza0.