Look around you. Jews have a god, although it's difficult and/or contentious and/or forbidden to pronounce the name of said creator/lawgiver/covenanter. Muslims, being their fellow patriarchal Abrahamic monotheists, of course have a god known as Allah. One of the few things most Christians can agree on, I think, is that there is indeed a god, and in a truly remarkable moment of unanimity, if not creativity, they even agreed at some point to call their god 'God'.
In short, ample empirical evidence exists to support the proposition that god(s) do(es) exist(s).
If that isn't convincing enough, we can look to the ancient Greeks, who were blessed with a number of colorful, if flawed, gods. The Romans had a pantheon full of gods and goddesses endowed with a wonderful array of humanlike qualities. Those human qualities of gods could make them either appealing or repellant, depending on one's attitude toward humans.
My ancestors the Norse had their own amazing and quirky assemblage of deities, and they were generous enough to share some of them with other Germanic folk in a loose kind of early pagan EU. Hindu tradition has a rich array of gods from Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva down through a plethora of lesser divine beings, embodying for our benefit a mind-boggling range of aspects of our own complex, amazing, and troubled existence.
I'm undoubtedly leaving out many gods and goddesses that exist in a number of cultures of which I am unaware, and I hope members of those cultures will forgive us our omissions (as we forgive those who omit against us). The fact that I don't know about your gods in no way implies that I deny their existence.
Silly question, Is there a god. Clearly there are gods and goddesses all over the place. If it's metaphysical questions you are interested in, you might as well ask, Is there a tree? Is there a mountain? Is there a language? Is there a story? Is there an insect? How many do you want? How much time have you got?
It's not like I lie awake at night wondering about these things, although I do admit the question has come up in dinner-table conversation. (You had to be there.) I bring it up now because I ran across a book recently with the intriguing title 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. I was intrigued as much by the subtitle as the title, but I'm sorry to say it has been a bit of a disappointment both as fiction and as theology.
But I went ahead and read it, and every time I was ready to give up and return it to the library, I'd start to care about the characters, some of whom are well-drawn, a few of whom seem like interchangeable foils for the protagonist, and some of whom are caricatures of the kind of people you love to hate.
It's a valiant literary attempt to do something really extraordinary in a single book, and some of the intellectual questions the author hamfistedly wedges into the narrative are interesting, although, as you might expect, those discursive asides tend to slow down the action just a bit.
It's a great idea to collect a whole bunch of cogent arguments, either for or against a controversial proposition, and use them as the bones of a novel. Here is a sampling from the Appendix, not for your edification but as an indication of the weighty tone that Rebecca Newburger Goldstein brings to her tale:
1. The Cosmological Argument
2. The Ontological Argument
3. The Argument from Design
4. The Argument from the Big Bang
5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences
9. The Argument from Answered Prayers
10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life
11. The Argument from Miracles
12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
17. The Argument from Altruism
18. The Argument from Free Will
19. The Argument from Personal Purpose
20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
23. The Argument from Holy Books
24. The Argument from Perfect Justice
25. The Argument from Suffering
26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius
29. The Argument from the Human Knowledge of Infinity
30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality
31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)
32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)
33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
34. The Argument from Sublimity
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments
You get the idea. She's a Serious Writer.
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