Most people arent quite atheist or theist but somewhere in a continuum between both extremes. At every point in that continuum, God has an entirely different meaning. In the theist extreme, God created everything in the universe all by himself. Somewhere further down the continuum, God guided evolution. Still further, God fine-tuned the universe and watched it grow. Somewhere in the middle, the universe may be a simulation run by a programmer. A little to the atheist side, God may be something abstract, like perception, hylozoism, panpsychism, or cosmic consciousness. A little further, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial species is indistinguishable from a God which may or may not intervene. All the way to the atheist extreme, its probably impossible to achieve a Singularity. All this ambiguity turn the word God into a shield you can hide behind: its hard to disprove someones beliefs when they are so vague they can mean just about anything. So addressing just what they mean by God can be a good way to humble them about their beliefs. Its easy to think that all people are extremists because those people talk the loudest, but extremism is more of a social identity than anything else. Most peoples personal beliefs are a lot more subtle, but they dont talk about them because theyre so intimate. But if you could get completely random people to talk about whether or not they believe in a God and what God means to them, theyll say something along the lines of I feel like theres something more out there that makes me feel that everythings alright. Of course in surveys people have to choose between two or three options.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 09:46:08 +0000