Of late one could have read several articles in various newspapers and magazines, which in turn took up the cudgels for and against the existence of god. Or God, if you prefer. For philosophical purposes here, it might be helpful to recall an argument Anselm, an 11th-century thinker, adduced for the existence of a deity: God is that that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
Something may have been lost in translation, but Anselm seems to have left the content of belief in the divine to the individual human being's intellectual power of conceiving. When Person A. hits the wall in the conceiving process, having conceived of nothing greater than his particular idea of deity, then that deity -- for him -- is God. The position is filled. None other should trouble to apply.
Unless I am mistaken, that sounds as if there might be little to no uniformity in human conceptions of deity, despite the best efforts of religious authorities to press dogmatic certitudes upon their flocks.
The idea of God is so common a notion that few human beings in proportion to the whole give it a second thought. It is only he or she who questions the likelihood of there being such a deity that turns heads.
A number of avowed atheists read these essays and are careful to point out to their author whenever they think he has skated too close to what they consider the thin ice of theism - i.e. belief in a transcendent deity, but worst of all the one that in varying ways is claimed by traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam to exist.
My atheists friends do not like to be reminded that, strictly speaking, the term "atheist" does not mean one who disavows belief in a deity or who claims that no such deity has ever existed, does not now exist or ever will. An "a-theist" is one who is not a theist -- the theist being one who, possessing nothing that could qualify as an objective datum, nevertheless confesses belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent deity "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid."*
On one occasion, I asked members of an adult inquirers class I was teaching if they were really interested in affirming the existence of such a deity as that language depicts. An uncomfortable silence ensued as I suppose my inquirers were looking back over the course of the past day or week or month or year and having to consider that everything they'd said and done may have registered in the consciousness of this deity whose human representative is supposed at some point to come again to judge both the quick and the dead.
Since every class has its clown, the clown in my class cleared his throat and said, "Honk if you prefer atheism."
The discussion that followed was as frank a thing of its kind as I had ever encountered or would ever encounter over more than 40 years of congregational work. It stopped almost everyone in the room in his or her tracks -- several being angry with me because I had not sprung quickly to the defense of orthodox belief. Others were frustrated because they thought they had come to the class to understand what it was they should believe and had not expected to become enmeshed in questions without answers.
Finally, one class member looked me in the eye and said: "Do you or do you not believe that God exists?" He did not seem to me to be in the mood for a lengthy philosophical disputation, so, keeping it brief, I said, "No. I don't know enough to believe such a thing." I expected him to throw something at me, but instead he asked me to say more.
I took the opportunity to invoke some of what I had read of Paul Tillich and what I had heard at his own feet years before. I told the story of a question/answer period at the end of a Tillich lecture on his concept of "the ground of being" as opposed to being itself. A student rose to ask, "So, Herr Doktor Tillich, would you say that God exists?"
Tillich leaned back in his chair, its front legs an inch or two from the floor, and stared upward for a moment or two. Then down came the chair with a bang, and addressing his interlocutor, he said, "Nein." Tillich went on to reiterate his idea of God as "the uncreated creator."
I've often wondered since what Tillich knew about the Big Bang hypothesis and whether or not he would consider whatever force is said to have initiated that momentous event to be his "uncreated creator."
Outside of colloquies -- both formal and informal -- during my graduate school years, that inquirers class taught now so long ago was the only instance in which I saw people wrestle so earnestly with a question they'd never dreamt had no certain answer.
I left them on that night with this thought: "The idea of God is like a large blank canvas upon which anyone can paint his or her conception of deity." One class member, who had up to that moment remained silent, spoke the last and most important words of all: "Yeah, but bring some turpentine, because you're going to change your mind a lot."
*From the Collect for Purity of Heart, Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 323