Uncredible double carnival: GOD or NOT

When I signed up to host an edition of GOD or NOT, I also signed up for the Philosopher's Carnival The date for the latter hadn't been decided yet, so I had no idea that it would be on the same day as GOD or NOT. But that's what happened, so while you're here, you might want to check out my edition of the philosophy carnival as well.

UPDATE: Here's two posts ommitted from the original carnival: Rev Bill's God is Love and RA's Big Daddly and the reptilian hindbrain.

In debates about things like the existence of God, it is sometimes complained that problems come out of bad definitions of the word "God." Just last week, I bought a copy of Skeptical Inquirer with several letters complaining that a previous issue's article, titled "The God of Eth," had worked of an erronous definition of "God." It was probably a good idea, then, for Donald to propose that we have a God or Not on the definition of God's existence.

When I began putting together this carnival, I had no idea so many entries would dwell on the above problem. The Evangelical Atheist went looking for a description that would apply to all gods humans have conceived, and could only come up with supernatural, immortal, worshiped - not a terribly satisfying definition.

Francois Tremblay lists further difficulties, and UberKuh makes our most definitive statement on the difficulty of defining God: "I have not seen a definition of God that does not contain internally contradictory properties or attributes, and I see no reason to suppose I might"

On the other hand, if you want a definition of God, why not go straight to holy writ? Based on such an analysis, Verum Serum has concluded three things: God is spirit, God is light, God is love. But after looking at the same books, Athana of Radical Goddess Thealogy declared that JehovahJawehAllah is "A jealous, sexless old sadist with a temper problem who gets off on war for the sake of war."

The above provide well-known approaches to the concept of God. I also received plenty of unconventional entries as well. Richard Blumberg argues that there is a sense in which God exists, but he nonetheless doesn't believe in him. Brendan McPhillps has made the novel proposal thatGod is energy At The Skwib, we have a story of Thang's attempts to understand the sky god, and the water god, and a whole bunch of other gods, who he does not grok. And Morgaine of The-Goddess has a multifaceted post that can be summed up by the sentence: "She is everything."

Last, Skeptic Rant has offered up a solution that is arguably most in keeping with the concept of semantics: put up a bunch of different Gods, let people vote. Perhaps that will finally solve our problem.

The next GOD or NOT will be held at Cadmusings. The topic: faith.