Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.
Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is “appropriate for us to worship”.
Reading Dawkins’s bestseller The God Delusion is like an encounter with a member of the thought police. This extract is an early example of how irritating he is for me. Here he privileges another ‘expert’s’ dismissal of those who read their God too flexibly; in other words in a non- dogmatic, non-prescriptive manner. The reader is positioned here to collude knowingly against those travesties of believers who would even DARE to see God everywhere. How ridiculous of course! But why I wonder? Is it because Dawkins’s book is a timely nay opportunistic attack on religious fundamnetalism which ‘usefully’ manages to take ‘God’ down with all those ‘aberrations’ of religious practice? ( more to come)