God
could be imaginary and no matter how many people believe it would be irrelevant.
OR...
God could actually exist, in which case no amount of science, philosophy, or supposed human evidence could wave Him away.
Third possibility:
Some powerful supernatural entity that could qualify as "God" actually exists, but there is no evidence of it.
Lacking any evidence of that entity to be able to learn anything about it (
Situation Normal whenever we try to deal with the supernatural), so people just do what they always do when they don't know what they're talking about: they make sh*t up.
Hence it's the same as the first possibility that the "God" people have made up is imaginary
despite the supernatural existence (not sure how that would work)
of a likely candidate for the title of "God".
This would be like ringo's point in
Message 1050 about the existence of unicorns (the National Animal of Scotland, BTW -- check out the
UK Coat of Arms):
ringo writes:
Unicorns could actually exist, in which case no amount of science, philosophy, or supposed human evidence could wave them away. But if there is no evidence that unicorns exist, they are irrelevant for any practical purpose.
Fourth possibility is a weakness of your second possibility:
So God exists, but the very nature of God is so incredibly far beyond the ability of our puny fallible human minds that we cannot understand it. As a result, we puny humans just make up sh*t about it based on what little we know (which is far less than we think).
Given how extremely little evidence we can find (if any) of it, the many thousands of different gods we have made up
and continue to make up all the time are no better than the first possibility that they are imaginary,
all made up from our own imagination.
For your second possibility to have any effect at all,
your god would need to make itself manifestly apparent. Since that has not happened (independently of the ingestion of certain substances like bad burritos), [language=body]slight head movement with raised eyebrows and gesture with both hands to signify, "
Nu?"[/language].
End result is that everybody "knows" what "God" is and disagrees with everybody else about it. The US Supreme Court has even ruled in church-state separation cases that government references to "God" are pretty much devoid of meaning and hence do not violate the separation clause of the First Amendment (I have errands to run so I'll have to hunt down that quote for you later).
So, harking back to my earlier topic about why believers approaching atheists are so fixated on "Why don't you believe God exists?" (corollary: "What is you
absolute proof that God doesn't exist?").
Whether any of the gods exist or not is really of no importance and very little interest. My own reason for leaving Christianity and becoming an atheist had absolutely nothing to do with God. Rather, I looked at what I was being required to believe and realized that I simply could not believe it.
And as believers have tried to convert me over the subsequent more-than-half-a-century they have consistently failed
not because of any "I don't believe in God" position, but rather because I don't believe
them. God has nothing to do with any of it.
™ Version 4.2
