Do you/I believe in God?

What do people mean when they say that?

I think it's an implied different question: "Do you believe in God the same way I do?"

The answer to that implied question can't possibly be "yes" because you don't really ever know what the asker's beliefs are. Asker may not really even know him/herself. How many of us really think about it in any real detail?

Do you have to have an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out?

My impression is that we are all selective about what exact details of the religious dogma we believe. Including, and perhaps especially, those who are most religious. Given the amount of overall inconsistencies and contradictions in any Bible/equivalent, why do you have to believe anything one way or the other? If we were all really strict about it, how would anyone ever commit a murder?

It probably all boils down to the essentially unanswerable questions of "why are we here?" and "what comes after this?" and the worry about there not even *being* an answer.

One bit of description about the afterlife I've read is that it is as different from this life as being an adult is from being five years old. You can't even *describe* being an adult to a five-year-old, they have neither the vocabulary or the concepts or the experiences to begin to understand completely. So we can't even understand the afterlife, if there even is one. (And really, if there is, and it's overmuch like this life here on earth, with *all the same people* -- do  you really want to go through eternity with the same bunch of idiots you have to deal with now? I don't think so)

So why ARE we here? Perhaps it's simpler to think about how we got here first. Suppose you were God...if you can create this amazing and complex universe, why would you do it? If we can't understand the afterlife, we probably can't understand this either, but it is at least more amenable to speculation.

The universe as we know it seems tuned to increase the likelihood that [intelligent] life will come to pass somewhere. It would not take much change to some basic physical/chemical properties of matter for things to still be a workable universe, but completely incapable of producing life, perhaps not even lasting long enough before collapsing for the basics of life to start. That suggests this universe was designed to eventually produce life, with the eventual outcome that that life becomes intelligent (why would you bother about life that does NOT eventually become intelligent?). Thus, a Creator of some sort.

But if you were God, and you could design and create this universe, why would you do it? To have worshippers? Ick--that's a creepy concept. I can't even imagine a being so smart and powerful wanting such a thing--I would not want to meet/know such a being. To have complete and total advance knowledge of how every single instant of time would go, how every single action of every single atom would combine or change? Seriously? What would be interesting about that? (it'd be worse than being Dr Bloody Bernofski.) It is the process of discovery and the unexpected surprises that are interesting.

I think that what would be interesting would be (if you were able to do so) to create a universe like the one we have, where randomness was an essential characteristic, where there were rules about how physical matter behaves, but designed-in unpredictability (stemming from the randomness). Your goal would really be more about observing emergent behavior. The Evolution of life. A universe with no emergent behavior would not be very interesting. What will happen? You don't know until it does so. How and where will life first develop? How many variations of it CAN develop? There are opposing forces at work--the self-organizing aspects of chemical reactions, and the de-organizing behavior of entropy. Can intelligent life develop at all? Just how far can it evolve? How long can it last? What sort of interesting things can it do for itself? Can intelligent lifeforms evolve in different places and discover each other? How different are they? What can they do together?

Would you ever really meddle in the ongoing development of life? Why? At what level? Because one of the individuals asked you to? I wouldn't. In fact, I wouldn't even be listening like that. What would be the point? Where would it stop? What would make one request better than another?

So are we just the results of God's PhD thesis research? Unknowable, I think. Does it matter? I personally don't care one way or the other.

So I probably don't believe in God the way you'd mean it if you asked me.

[Later: this past week was "talk with young atheists" on NPR (well, it wasn't called that, but it WAS that). The question posed was really "Did they believe in God? how did they lose the belief?" Nobody said anything like the above.]