atheism vs. agnosticism

All this would be much clearer if we could see god making universes and take notes.

like a seed or a stick of dynamite

seeds grow by accreting stuff from outside themselves and organizing it, not by creating it from nothing. dynamite expands its own substance, so it probably a better analogy, but that leaves the idea that god's whole substance and activity is identical to the whole substance and activity of the universe, which makes a kind of pantheistic sense, but leads to the obvious question about why it would be useful to retain any concept of god at all.

PUTZGOD

Why is my dog so scared of thunder? Is it just an excuse to be allowed up on the couch?

Why is my dog so scared of thunder?

Because:

• We're talking about a dog.
• It's a very loud noise; it can be louder than almost any other natural sound.
• It has no visible connection to anything a dog understands.
• It can't be escaped; it's everywhere.
• Remember that humans are often frightened of it, too.

I think I've said a variation of this on all of our religious threads but: these kids of debates will always founder if there's a failure to distinguish the different kinds of values or "language games" at work in religious narratives vs other "explanatory" frameworks. Robert Bellah's extraordinary "Religion in Human Evolution" draws on Merlin Donald's distinction between "theoretical culture" (which Bellah identifies with the post axial religions) and "narrative culture" (pre-axial). I haven't read Donald yet but that seems like a useful distinction to me--in particular because it raises the questions of social function, value, and the non-negotiable relationship between theory and narrative. It's almost as if raising the question of the "existence" of god is a kind of confusion of categories, a holdover of the failed medieval attempt to unite theory and narrative.