Do You Believe in God?

This question has perhaps caused more confusion and discord than any other. Except for those whose concept of God is unchanged since childhood, there are almost as many ideas of God as there are people. A similar question might be, "Do you believe in your favorite color?" And, more often than not, the questioner is really asking, "Do you believe in my God?" Which makes my silly analogy, "Do you believe in my favorite color?" I'm afraid the chance for a meaningful response approaches zero at this point.

Some definitions of God are amazingly insightful; some are as complex as the most sophisticated scientific concepts and can only be understood after much dedicated study; some are inspiring; some offer new philosophical ways of interpreting phenomena. All of them attempt to give meaning to the human condition. Even in the Christian, Judaic, and Islamic traditions, there are many definitions of God. Karen Armstrong wrote about those many different and changing definitions in an excellent book called The History of God.

A less confusing question may be, "Can you define the God you believe in?" or "Can you define the God you do not believe in?"

In Reason and Responsibility, which is a pretty good collection of introductory philosophical essays, there is a famous parable by Antony Flew, a notable atheistic philosopher of the late 20th century.

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, 'Some gardener must tend this plot.' So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. 'But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.' So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. 'But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.' At last the Skeptic despairs, 'But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?'

There is a not so famous response by Christian theologian John Frame which I find less interesting and am not going to lengthen this post with, but which can be read here. It's the second parable.

Flew, with much notoriety in philosophical circles, converted to a deist late in life and wrote a second parable. (He credited his move to deism to new scientific discoveries, similar to Martin's blog entry and study of the Fine-tuning question.)

He tells the story of a cell phone that washes ashore on a remote island inhabited by primitive people, who were otherwise out of touch with modern civilizations.  The natives there play with the numbers on the phone, and when they hear different voices coming out of the little box, the assumption they make is that the box itself is making all the noises.  The tribe has some clever scientists who are able to replicate this box that had washed ashore, and they hear the same voices.  They come to the conclusion that the obvious is true, namely that the voices are merely properties of the device.

Then the great sage of the tribe suggests that the voices that are similar to the tribe's own but coming in a different language were not found simply in the little box, but that they were coming from afar off, from real people, not from parts of this little box, and argued that this consideration should be explored as a real possibility.  However, the tribal "scientists" refused to consider it at all.  They remained close-minded -- as many modern thinkers have been totally close-minded to any possibility to the existence of God and are forced to argue that life on this planet has arisen spontaneously by chance, and that even the so-called laws of nature with which science works are lawless in themselves.  The examination of the nature and the properties of things, or the "what" questions have not been able to answer the "why" questions, and particularly the "how" questions of any one thing's existence or how life has come to pass. 

I'm not sure this parable is better than the first. Personally, I remember Flew's first parable slightly differently. Here is my version:

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing was an extraordinary garden, beautiful with incredible plants and flowers. One explorer says, 'Some gardener must tend this plot.' So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The two continue their discussion as detailed above about how there is no evidence that a gardener exists. As they give up and prepare to move on, they notice some weeds and dead flowers in the garden. The one says to the other, "Well, before we go why don't we just clean this up a bit.", and they do. 

Instead of asking the question, "Do you believe in God?", perhaps a more meaningful one would be, "How can we bring more justice and kindness into the world?"