I'm about as naturalistic as you can get. I do not believe that anything that does not have physical properties can possibly exist. I'm as certain about this as I am about anything. But does this rule out the possibility of the existence of something we might call God? Not necessarily. It only means that God is not supernatural.
I'm having trouble imagining the concept of a 'naturalistic God'.
As you've pointed out before Yazata, discussions such as this one often suffer from the problems associated with not defining exactly what kind of God we are talking about. It seems that the default God on these forums is the one featured in Judeo-Christian theology but that is not the God I typically concern myself with. God is, to me, nothing more than a non-specific largely undefined philosophical concept.
There's a rather abstract 'God of the philosophers' I guess, where God is kind of defined as whatever fulfills what (controversially) are a set of necessary philosophical functions. First-cause, designer, ground of being, teleological goal perhaps.
As for me, I see more need for some of these functions than for others. For example, I feel (it's kind of intuitive) that the question why reality exists at all, why there's something rather than nothing, is the ultimate ontological question. I sense the contingency of being very strongly. Others don't. They blithely dismiss the whole problem with a wave of their hand and an Eleatic-style 'non-existence doesn't exist', which strikes me as sophistry, as whistling in the dark.
But having said that, I don't think that imagining whatever the answer might be (if there is an answer) as somehow being "God" is at all helpful. That just gratuitously introduces a whole collection of traditional religious connotations and associations surrounding the word 'God', while still leaving us stuck with the problem of accounting for the existence of God, with is really just the original problem restated.
The reason that I don't completely reject the idea of God like true atheists do is simply because there is no way to be absolutely certain that it is an impossibility.
I guess that there's some possibility that God is just as he's portrayed in the Bible. I'd assign that a very low probability and in my own life I don't believe it. The same thing applies to Allah and the Quran, some probability of truth, but so small that I feel confident in dismissing it. The same thing for Saivism and Vishnaivism. It's even possible that this is the Matrix and I'm really a body plugged into a nutrient vat living a virtual life in a virtual world. But I don't believe that either.
I guess that as we move away from the details of concrete religious traditions (and science-fiction stories) and make our definition 'God' more and more philosophical, functional and abstract, that the probability of something actually corresponding to the word increases. How much, it's hard to say. It's probably more likely that some unknown first-cause exists than that Hebrew mythology is uniquely true.
But cognitive content is draining out of the word 'God' when it's redefined as whatever hypothetically fulfills some philosophical function. At some point the question arises -- what reason remains for calling this hypothetical philosophical function 'God'? We don't really know that there's only one single entity that fulfills the function. Whatever fulfills it, it probably isn't a person like we are. It probably has nothing to do with human morality or with salvation. It's probably unrelated to any purported religious revelations.
So when I respond the way I initially did to Dywyddyr, I am simply defending the intellectual position of
agnostic atheism rather than a belief in any particular God.
That's cool. I basically agree with you, I think. I wasn't really challenging you and I apologize if it seemed that way. I was just reacting to your post as one of the more substantive in this thread and a good jumping off point for expressing my own views on the logical compatibility of religious faith and science. That's what I'm doing in this post too, improvising around your ideas and exploring my own reaction to them.
