This discussion has a neat segue to American Gods where Neil Gaiman argues precisely that this common scientific view of the relation between belief and existence is incorrect. A main theme of the book is that Gods exist in human hearts, and fall out of existence when they are forgotten and ignored. Gaiman's outlook is actually compatible with a key Biblical text, 1 John 4:16 - "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God" - in suggesting that God is not an entity but a quality of human existence. Here we have belief in love serving to make God exist, with a constructed narrative a main part of the nature of an imagined God.Chris OConnor wrote:Exactly. Belief in something doesn't make it exist. Lack of belief doesn't make it not exist.I don’t think there is a god, but if there is it would exist regardless of my lack of belief.
The problem, relating here to the issue of religion as child abuse, is that this existential theme of love is set within a complex narrative of traditional faith which propounds many claims that are empirically false. Its defenders try to justify the myth according to the categories of modern science by turning God into a real entity, when the Biblical equation between God and love quoted above is incompatible with such imaginative distortion, which is known as reification.
Logically, love is not an entity, therefore if God = Love, God is not an entity.
I do think it is abusive to tell a child that something you know to be false is in fact true. Hence it is reasonable to say "God is love" but not reasonable to claim that Biblical stories are historical when strong evidence indicates otherwise.
The value of the 'God is love' theme, getting back to an earlier brief conversation with Chris on whether God is an entity or a presence, is that placing a highest value on love gives a logical path with a heart, providing a basis to assess other moral claims.
The question of whether this points to an existent God is not simple. Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg observed in his discussion of the trinity that the Father is not a father without the Son, so the Christian God is intrinsically relational, as in the 'God is love' idea from John. A being whose nature is relational depends on those it relates to, so God is in fact largely constituted by human belief.
The problem is that belief can be false or true. As I see it, false belief is not sustainable, whereas true belief provides a sustainable path to salvation. The truth of belief is a question of evidence and logic, not of traditional authority. Traditional ideas need to be redefined to make them compatible with modern understanding.
RT