I'm not going to tell you whether God exists. That you will have to discover, or decide, for yourself.

I am going to say a few things about the idea of God, which is a different matter.

The first question is what sphere or spheres of knowledge the God-concept relates to. If you have been following this series, you know that there are three of these.

But before addressing even that question, we have to decide which God-concept we're talking about.

We've been talking as though there is only one, but that is not at all the case.

The Jewish God is not a trinity. Nor is the God of Islam. The Baptist God has no use for the Papacy. The Presbyterian God is not particularly keen on immersion. The current God of a great many faiths would completely reject wholesale slaughter of enemies, and yet, the God of ancient Israel demanded it.

Most of those faiths would want to claim that their God is the God of ancient Israel, and that God does not change. But the fact is that there are as many different God concepts as there are religious cultures, and those concepts do change, as the cultures change their world-views and values.

Nor is this simply the point of view of an outsider. The Hebrew scriptures speak of multiple Gods. "Hear, oh Israel. The Lord your God is one God, and thou shalt have no other Gods before him…you shall not bow down to them, or worship them."

Every culture had its own God, its own cult, its own priesthood in those days. Israel was not unique. And so it is today.

When we create models of the outside world, we expect them to become universal, to converge as time goes on. We may differ as to whether to call a photon a wave or particle, but that becomes a problem to be solved, a way to engage the mystery.

As time goes on, most of our models and categories of the outside world tend to converge. The more experience we have of something in the outside world, the more we agree on its nature. The periodic table of the elements is pretty much the same in every culture. The process for refining uranium doesn't change from one denomination to the next.

In the outside world, if I were to disagree with you about the number of legs on a kangaroo, and over the years both you and I claimed to have multiple experiences of kangaroos, and we continued to disagree, people would begin to doubt whether we were really having those experiences at all—or, possibly, whether we were really talking about the same thing.

But we do expect that cultural models and categories will be different from one community to the next. We don't expect two high schools' mascots to be the same, or their traditions to be identical. We don't expect holidays to be celebrated in the same way in Afghanistan as they are in Chicago.

We don't expect the main language in a Russian agricultural village to be English, or a king in Africa to look, or act, like a king in England.

So the very fact that we can't agree on what God is like—or what God likes—from one community to the next argues, on the face of it, that God is a cultural category, a way of encountering mystery in the cultural sphere.

This is not a final proof, of course. And, in fact, I think there is more to the God concept than this. But before I get to that, let's look at some of the other indicators.

For our purposes, I'll use a sort of bare-bones, generic God concept. That is, I'll try to avoid all of those big and little differences, which would make us wonder whether we're talking about the same person, and stick to the central, rather uninteresting, idea.

Earlier in this series I mentioned two tests that can sometimes be used to distinguish between concepts focused on the outside domain and concepts focused on the cultural domain.

The first test was the question as to what would change, if (in this case) God ceased to exist, but no one noticed.

As in the case of Santa Claus, this test is very little help. The reason is exactly the same here as it was there. If I believe that God exists in the outside world, then of course I will believe that many things might change, just as, if I believed in Santa, I would believe that the presents would stop coming.

The second test was to ask what the concept was used for.

As was the case with Santa, the answer is more instructive but still mixed. The primary use of the God concept is obviously cultural. The God concept is used to advocate values, to build communities, to modify behavior, to inspire artistic efforts, to organize charity efforts.

And, although both Newton and Leibnitz tried to integrate the God concept into the study and manipulation of the "outside" world, the concept has born no scientific fruit.

On the other hand, just as those pesky presents confused the issue with Santa, believers often (not always) believe that God can be used to influence and navigate the outside world—through prayers and miracles. The evidence for this is not good enough to convince non-believers (some would say it is non-existent). But many believers still hold to it.

Consequently, the second test is a mixed bag.

The other indicators we used with Santa can be used here as well.

1. Even though each culture has its own God, each culture also believes that its God is the only God—that God is unique, like Santa.
   
   But things in the outside world are not generally unique. There are multiple cars, horses, cows, etc. Cultural things, however, are sometimes unique. There is only one number two, one Superman, one constitution (though it has many incarnations), one American Revolution.
   


2. God, like Santa, is different.
   
   He is a "person", but he can do things other people cannot do. He knows everything, is all powerful, is everywhere at once. He violates the restrictions of his basic category. Again, this is common among cultural concepts. Superman and Beowulf and Hercules do what men cannot do. Athena and Zeus have powers above those of mortal persons.
   


3. God is inaccessible.
   
   He is both nearer and farther than the North Pole, and yet we still cannot get any verification that he has received our messages. And his messages to us are mediated by history, by literature, by other human beings.
   
   Even when believers think they are receiving direct communication from God, it is mediated through their own, inner, world—and most religious communities encourage such communications to be confirmed by the judgment of others: another form of mediation.
   
   Most of the information we receive "from God" comes from sermons or books or teachers—in the same way that most of our communications from "the government" are transmitted by human beings on the government's behalf.
   


4. Finally, the related concepts of "faith" and "belief" are tip-offs.
   
   We may talk about faith and believing in regards to the outside world, but usually only in terms of specifics: "Believe me, the check is in the mail." But when it comes to basic concepts—gravity, the impenetrability of steel posts, the atomic number of hydrogen—we don't speak in terms of faith.
   
   However, we do speak of faith and belief in cultural matters: belief that the system works, faith that the home team will win, trust that the president is doing what is right for the country, faith in the constitution, belief in love, or community—or Santa Claus.
   

The God concept is used to clarify and communicate the community's values, to focus the community's energy, to perceive, navigate, and manipulate the unity of the community, but it is also used to perceive, navigate, and manipulate the private sphere—the realm of individual consciousness.

For we are mysteries to ourselves, as well.

It is very common for believers to use the God-concept in order to interpret, perceive, and navigate their inner lives. People pray over decisions, they have one-sided dialogs with God in their heads, they seek "God's Will", "God's forgiveness", "God's Love".

They perceive the mystery at the depths of their being through a model based on personhood, and their inner life is experienced as a relationship.

There is nothing wrong about this on the face of it—however strange it might sound to an unbeliever. The only question is the "fit" of the model, and whether it provides a continuing, and growing, disclosure of the mystery.

I happen to think two things about this, based on my own experience from my years as a believer, and from second-hand experience based on my years as a counselor of pastors, but I want to stress that these are just my opinion.

1. First, the bad news:
   
   I don't think the God model, in its present form, is a particularly good fit to the mysteries it seeks to interpret. I've written elsewhere about some of the particular problems I see with the model, and where those problems come from. But I think the biggest danger is the tendency to take it as applying to the outside world.
   
   This leads to the belief that the customs of my tribe are the laws of the universe. I don't have to prove this, because my "knowledge" is faith-based, but I do, then, have the responsibility to force those ideas on the rest of the world.
   
   This is why I think that a moderate religious stance, which recognizes that religious categories are about faith and practice, rather than the outside world, is a promising thing.
   
   At the other end of the spectrum is fundamentalism, which makes both of the above errors in the most flagrant way, and which is, at this very moment putting all of our lives in peril.
   


2. Second, the good news:
   
   I think that the God model, taken seriously, is its own cure.
   
   To take a model seriously is to actively use it to encounter mystery. The person who really believes in God cannot help but seek out experiences of God, cannot help but seek to understand the tradition more deeply, cannot help but wrestle with the concepts it provides—and cannot help but allow the experience thus gained to modify the model, or lead to its rejection.
   
   I firmly believe that anyone who does that will, eventually, come to see the God concept as a cultural model, and come to question its value, or modify it dramatically, as well.
   
   This is one of the reasons that the tradition itself is full of heresy.
   
   The author of Genesis 3 says clearly that moral knowledge is deadly. The prophets quote God as discounting sacrifice and tithes in favor of social justice. Jesus turns the king model on its head by teaching his disciples to call God "Father", thus declaring them all kings, and all divine, at the same time. The Apostle Paul takes the God of Israel to the goyim, and says that the Jewish Law is the cause of sin.
   
   In each of these cases, the author was one who took the model seriously and used it to encounter the mystery beneath. In each of these cases the result was a fundamental questioning of the received world-view—in some cases, cataclysmic.
   
   On the other hand, the believer who takes his or her God model to apply to the outside world, who steadfastly refuses to allow experience to change that model, but instead tries to get the world to conform to the model, is refusing to encounter mystery, and does not want, really, to encounter God.
   

Does God exist?

Many concepts of God do. And the underlying mystery does, as well—in both the private and the cultural spheres.

But God?

You'll have to answer that question yourself.

What I think doesn't, finally, matter.

At least, that's what I think today.