Wynn
"Given the usual definitions of God, it is not possible for us not to be affected by God."
You are confusing the definition of god with his actually existence.
I don't even know what "the usual definitions of God" are, or why we should accept them. (It seems like an implicit demand that Christian theology be accepted a-priori.)
Remember that the map is not the territory. You can define many things that are pure non-sense, defining them does not make them real. I can define the attributes of the invisible dragon in my basement, but that does not mean there is an invisible dragon in my basement.
I know nothing about any god, but then, neither do you.
The definition of 'God' that people are talking about here seems to be approaching a 'Matrix'-style 'brain in a vat' situation. That's where all of our possible experience is simply... fake... a simulation, not real. It's an illustration of the bigger and far more ancient problem of skepticism. How can we ever tell the difference between truth and falsity if every possible piece of evidence might itself be false? (To a certain extent, the whole history of modern post-medieval Western philosophy is a giant meditation on the problem of skepticism.)
I might be mistaken, but Wynn seemingly wants to argue that 'God' (whatever that is) is the kind of thing about which evidence isn't applicable. In this case, all the events of the universe remain exactly the same (a few special miracles excepted perhaps) whether or not 'God' exists, the difference being that the theist wants to define everything that happens as being due to 'the will of God'.
My own opinions about "pure nonsense" (literally, not perjoratively) are similar to yours, I think. (If you think you're Grumpy, you haven't seen me griping yet. Welcome to the board, btw.)
Science provides us with a pretty good means of producing naturalistic accounts of natural events, by linking them together causally. If a theist account doesn't add anything to that, then it becomes kind of superfluous from a physical point of view and can be dropped. That's what's happened over the last few hundred years as natural theology's receded.
But even if the theistic account has proven itself impotent in explaining individual events within the universe, there's seemingly still the more metaphysical 'Matrix' issue. Perhaps the entire universe, including all of its contents and their relationships, is somehow 'virtual'. Maybe it's a dream or something. Or maybe there's a 'God' in a transcendental 'heaven' somewhere who is madly pulling all the strings and upon whom everything's fundamental being depends. Who knows? And who can possibly know, when all the possible evidence that we could use to make the determination is potentially part of the illusion?
It seems to me that we are always going to be left with that kind of doubt, it's inescapable. The way I conceptualize it is to say that it's just another and much more portentious way of acknowledging that we can always be wrong, that we can always be mistaken. No matter how we think things are, conceivably they may really be some other way. That possibility of error will probably always be with us as long as we remain human.
But this universe that we do experience, that we can have evidence about, is where we live our lives and it's what defines 'reality" for human beings like us.
Maybe we will discover after we die that it's all a game or a test or something else. I sincerely doubt it. I have no reason to think that. On these kind of skeptical theories, I seemingly can't have any reason to believe that. We certainly have no way of choosing among some uncountable number of alternative transcendental possibilities. We probably can't even imagine most of them since by definition they would transcend human experience entirely.
