Drange emphasizes that any stance on 'Does God exist?' is made with respect to a particular concept of what one claims to consider 'God' to represent
The problem with this stance is that it focuses on the external characteristics of God rather than God.
If you talk about a home you talk about where a family of any size lives, the base from which they go out to do their thing in the rest of the world. What it is made of, how big it is, how many bathrooms, if any, it has are all useful in making inferences about those calling the place home, but are independent of the concept of whether homes exist....
If God is the referent for worship and reverence of a group of people of any size, questions of supernatural vs, natural, creator vs. created, real existence vs. imaginary existence, all become irrelevant. One can focus on important questions. Is God functional for believers? Is God functional for non-believers? Is God functional for the society in which it exists? Is God functional for the cosmopolitan world in which some of us live?
These are not trivial questions. One must examine the God,or the inference of God by studying the beliefs of the group to see if the particular God is acceptable....
J'C: This is where I think Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, et all are strategically in error. Only Dawkins even alludes to the functionality of God beliefs, and then uses only horrible examples of dysfunctionality to make his point. A believer in God is not going to be convinced God does not exist because the mythical accretions that have adhered over the ages are ridiculous. They already know that, but the accretions are helpful in defining the group and maintaining group unity. A believer may know that God is not a supernatural omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent alpha humanoid, these things cannot exist in a single entity. But believing anyway creates the sense of awe and reverence necessary for ceding some measure of control over ones life to God.
For some "Letting go and let God." is a necessary part of living a relatively meaningless life as an assembly line robot, barfly and couch potato. God works for them, they at least show up for work each day, and once a week God may send them to Habitat for Humanity or a soup kitchen to pay their social dues to their community.
Even a person who is none of the above may find God belief useful in eliminating questions of meaning and purpose from one's life and freeing them to pursue their muse, whatever that may be. Many of my friends never think about being alive and having to die. God takes care of all of that. They can build their Ponzi scheme, write their symphony, or build the computing cloud without a thought of why. In many ways this might be comforting. It would drive me nuts.
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