IS THERE A GOD?

      To be brutally honest, the very question, "Is there a God?" is absurd.
      It is truly no different than the question of whether or not there might be a Peter Pan or an Alice.
      "God" is a word. So far as we know, that is all that it is - a mere word.
      There exists not so much as a sliver of evidence to either support or refute the idea that the word suggests, a little fact that poses some knotty little problems of its own.
      Before asking whether there is a God, it seems wise to take a moment to consider what it is precisely that we are referring to by asking such a question.
      Our primary inquiry on the subject then, should not be, "Is there a God," but "What is God?"
      The most popular response to this nigh-universal curiosity places in our laps the somewhat nebulous suggestion that God is a Supreme Being. It is an answer that most offer without so much as even thinking about it.
      And therein lies the problem. They don't think about it. From one generation to the next, they just keep passing around the same irrational beliefs (in much the same way we so casually pass around our resident germs).
      One of the primary goals of this website is to goad people into actually thinking about the idea of God (with the emphasis on the word "idea").
      Idea ... ay, there's the rub.
      One of my primary sermons focuses on words, mainly their abstract and concrete manifestations. I have yet to come across a single word that could not be listed under one of those two headings.
      The concept is simplicity itself. If a word can somehow be matched with an object (or event) that is capable of being sensed, then said word is concrete. The word "rock" is a no-brainer example. It is not just a word. There is an actual object it may be paired with. In fact, there are multitudes of such objects.
      By contrast, the word "God" may not be placed alongside anything that is tangible.
      The same is true, by the way, of any abstract word. You cannot, for example, find an object that corresponds with the word "time." Does this mean that time does not exist? Well, as a matter of fact, that is exactly what it means. There is no object that we call time so much as there is a (very human) feeling that there is such a thing.
      It may be objected that time is measurable and therefore must be something real. I demur. Time is not being measured at all. Motion is being measured. From the beating of a heart to the pulsing of an atom, there is no sort of time measurement that is not associated with physical movement.
      Now, to be sure, there is a way that abstractions do indeed enjoy a form of existence. Time and God both exist as social realities. I am simply contending that they do not exist as natural ones.
      There are many things that many people take for granted as being real, when in fact their supposedly real existence takes place only within the context of the human condition. I refer to such things as love, good and evil, human rights, just and unjust and so on. None of these things (which are not things at all; they're only ideas) enjoys a natural existence. They come into existence when human beings begin talking about them. If the human beings were ever to desist with such talk, the ideas would vanish in the wake of the silence.
      Is there a God? Within the context of human culture, there is most definitely such an Entity, however non-definable, or purely speculative, IT might be.
      By contrast, outside of that commerce we know as human language, in the world of Nature, the word (and the corresponding idea) "God" has no meaning, absolutely no meaning whatsoever.