God: a reappraisal

By a strange paradox, the subject at hand is on everybody's lips but nobody's mind. For this is that area of inquiry which, being least amenable to certainty, also requires us to be at our most dogmatic. We grab for flowers, but only soil our hands. We climb the peak, but the way is obscured by mists. We talk, but it is a superabundance of nonsense.

There is no reason to think I can do any better. But nor is that a reason not to try. The recent publications on the attendant subject – I am thinking here of Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, McGrath, Blanchard – have been uniformly unimpressive. The atheists say that the phenomena of the universe, in all their wonder and multiformity, can be explained without recourse to theistic beliefs. The believers retort, with Dostoyevsky, that if God does not exist then the universe is without meaning or purpose. I accept both of these assertions, and concede that they raise prescient questions; but I will shelve them both for the time being, for the simple reason that they do not get to the root of the problem. It can easily be seen that neither are arguments for or against the existence of God.

I have an intimation of God. What do I mean when I say this? It is surely not without importance that it seems counterintuitive to say that I have an intimation of God's non-existence. Is this because God is a necessary being? One could render 'necessary' in two possible ways: in Spinoza's sense, as connoting something which is not limited by, or logically anterior to, anything else; or I could look at it as David Lewis does, to wit: as something which occurs in all possible worlds.
In other words: can we think about the world without instantiating God?

I leave this question open for the time being. I will continue with this later.