What the heck do we mean by "god"?

"Where is God? In the sky? In me? In you? Why is God’s location always changing?"

"Religion doesn’t explain anything – you say God created the universe. Who or what created God/ You’re trying to explain a mystery with a bigger mystery."

"Why do you believe in something which cannot be seen or measured in any way whatsoever?"

In many ways these questions are all getting at the same sort of problem so I thought I’d start by dealing with them each sort of together, then one by one. The problem as I see it is that in the western pluralistic society that we live we no longer really have anything close to a shared understanding of what someone means when they use the word ‘god’. For example, when Christians say the word ‘god’ in public most people assume they actually mean the god of an 18th Century philosophical movement called Deism, the god of people like Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and the “founding fathers”, or Voltaire. This is the “supreme being” or possible creator of the world that is otherwise distant and uninvolved in our lives as human beings, who might occasionally do something “supernatural” or “magic”. Such a god is so far away, abstract and irrelevant that there is little need to have any such belief. Just have a look at Richard Dawkins’ recent critique of such belief for an example.

When people talk of “god” publicly they might otherwise mean something like “life force” or the thing that underlies everything rather than some sort of personal creator. This is “pantheism”, where god and our world are basically the same thing, or “panentheism” where rather confusingly “all is in god”. Just listen to some in the new age movement, or half the “lifestyle and spirituality” section in Whitcoulls or Borders to hear or read these kinds of perspectives.

Of course, then there are multiple other religious options and choices and variations. This leaves me, at least, very confused by what people mean when they say “god”.

So then…in the next few days I’ll do blogs on each of these questions, and at least my attempt to sketch out what Christians (should) mean when they say the word “God”…