For a significant fraction of the population, the words “God” and “Christian” signify several specific and related beliefs: that God exists, and is the Supreme Being who Created the Universe (SBwCU); that God is all knowing, all loving, and all powerful; that Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God, sent to Earth to redeem mankind from his sins; that Christ died on the cross, but rose again the third day thereafter, thus defeating death; that in the hereafter, those who believe in Him will survive death as well, and that their eternal souls will go to Heaven to reside in bliss with God and his son Jesus forever.

Individually, each one of these statements strikes me as highly unlikely to be true. Taken together, it can be logically proven that they can’t all be true, not all at the same time. For example, the mere existence of evil implies that God can’t be both all powerful and all good: either God must not be able to stop all evil, in which case He isn’t all powerful, or He chooses not to, in which case He’s not all good. The only way to deny the conclusion is to deny the premises, the existence of evil. But evil certainly appears to exist, even in an impersonal and random universe, at least in terms of my own survival, and of the survival of humanity at large. I, at least, have never heard a convincing argument that all the apparent evil in the world is actually not evil at all.

“But you’re holding God accountable to your own standards! How reasonable is that?”

Logic holds even God accountable. God can’t be both all good and all powerful, given the existence of evil.

But for a significant minority of the population, “God” and “Christian” have more abstract meanings. These people are less ready than their fundamentalist brethren to pit God against science in a contest over the facts. For these moderate believers, science is about the facts, while religion is about values, and the “larger picture”. Concepts like the divinity of Christ are stages in a spiritual evolution. “God” refers to the ultimate reality that underlies Existence, to the ultimate mystery of things. No more, no less.

The more abstract God becomes, the more I like Him. The less He cares about us, the better. I would be perfectly happy with the perfectly abstract God, which represented everything, and nothing, at the same time.

To borrow a concept from Computer Science, the perfectly abstract God is an uninstantiated class: now that’s a God an atheist could live with.