To me it makes a difference because it is often asked to “define God.” and “provide evidence.” The implication is it should be something presented in peer reviewed research or it’s not valid. I disagree. Even with peer reviewed research, just because someone manages to get published doesn’t mean there paper then holds a “new truth.”….it must be a collection of data over a long period of time to build the basis for a theory and even then….it comes down to who can cough up the dough for the research. That (to me) is not a system ever capable of defining a deity.
What knowledge is there about God that could ever be captured within the pages of a scientific journal?
If God is to be defined, it has to be in a philosophical way. And, good luck with that. Theologists spend their whole lives chasing down that rabbit hole. This is really because the different parts of the Christian story don’t fit together with each other, even though they have validity as individual patches in the patchwork.
However, it can be shown scientifically and philosophically that there is a spiritual and ethical core within the monotheistic religions that is logical, coherent, and valid – because these religions originated as a natural way to make human beings cooperate, and cooperation is a natural scientifically describable situation, with clear logical principles based on evolution and natural selection. So, this part makes perfect sense.
The video by Paul Vitz (The Psychology of Atheism – Paul C. Vitz, PhD), which has been heavily criticised by atheists, but which I like, talks about how he finds (from a very limited selection) that women relate to religion (and atheism) in terms of personal relationships (with God / Jesus, or with people); and men mostly relate to both atheism and religion, intellectually and philosophically.
It’s a definition of darkness: the necessary and sufficient condition that is the single defining feature of darkness. That’s what it means when it is dark: there is no light.
“Darkness” is not a “description” of the absence of light: it’s a single word, a label. It’s a noise, which we have given to “absence of light” as a name. So, it doesn’t describe the absence of light: it just names it.
However, “dark” describes any situation where there is no light, because “dark” contains the definition, “absence of light”.
So Belle…do you believe the god Ganesh exists as a real entity? Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists are pretty much all devoted to this deity, about the same number of people as there are Christians. If you say no, or yes please explain why. Somehow I am not expecting some yes/no answer, which means you are agnostic about this god which makes sense since you were not indoctrinated into this belief.
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