The more authentic God, so to speak, is necessarily without limitations, and I don’t see the advantage of believing in a lesser God if a greater one exists. You might say this is just the workings of the imagination, and I would agree with you to a point. Religion is a product of man’s attempt to explain an immaterial transcendent cause of the universe by imagining past our limitations and the limitations of the universe.

But again, that’s a completely unsatisfying answer when it comes to actual evidence. “Imagining past our limitations” doesn’t tell us anything about anything except our own capacity to imagine. If you want to convince me of the existence of something, you need to show me more than your ability to imagine it.

I doubt we could come to a consensus on that. Mainly because we don’t have a common ground from which to describe those things. If we did, we’d be in the same religion. And I don’t think that talking about them with you would reveal just how inconsistent and bizarre they are, it would just reveal how inconsistent and bizarre our understanding of them is. That’s why even Christians can’t agree on a definitive description of God, though there are some things all of them agree on. The infinite defies description anyway, and doesn’t fit into our little boxes of understanding.

So why not Zeus? Zeus is still subject to certain limitations. One is left to answer the question of who put those limitations on him until we are brought to a greater being who is all powerful and created those limitations. The more authentic God, so to speak, is necessarily without limitations, and I don’t see the advantage of believing in a lesser God if a greater one exists. You might say this is just the workings of the imagination, and I would agree with you to a point. Religion is a product of man’s attempt to explain an immaterial transcendent cause of the universe by imagining past our limitations and the limitations of the universe. “Who created those limitations” or “what created those limitations” are both valid questions; ones that science cannot engage in answering due its own limitations. If you want to say that Zeus has no limitations, then you and I would be talking about the same God, just by a different name.

Anyway, who said that the mysteries of the universe aren’t a problem? I consider them a problem, and it’s one I’m very interested in unraveling. But the idea that just because there is no readily available explanation, we should immediately leap to assuming that all unanswered questions should be answered by a divine, anthropocentric sentience makes no sense. Why your God? Why not just blame everything on Zeus?

Anyway, the fact that atheism doesn’t answer every question ever isn’t a problem, because atheism doesn’t claim to answer anything. It’s a skeptical, negative claim. At heart, it’s a modest one, too: all it’s saying is that there is insufficient evidence to support the thesis, “God exists.”

Atheists have effectively left an intellectual hole while having nothing to fill the hole with. Yet, we are encouraged to believe this is somehow not a problem.

On a different subject entirely, I have no desire to be at odds with you personally. I’m just here for a good conversation containing opposite viewpoints. I think you’re a very intellectual man, and I’ve enjoyed the discussion so far. Thanks.

(Sorry about the gratuitous use of the word box.)

Now, maybe you weren’t thinking in that direction. I don’t know a whole lot about theoretical physics. Could you give me an example of a metanarrative that theoretical physics has provided that can fully replace the creation narrative? The beauty of the God-explanation is that it gives meaning to all events in history and not just the beginning. Is there a theory that can do the same thing?

So, if I understand you correctly, metaphysical explanations aren’t facts, but metaphors or myths. And, you proclaim them useful only to better describe self, but not useful to describe how we came into being.