It was about this time that poet Emily Dickinson noted, "They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse." Then, as now, many Unitarian Universalists went looking for God but came up empty-handed. Was Unitarianism becoming an atheism? No "god-talk" here.

God Dethroned

The drift away from a personal God of history became outright rejection with the turn of the 20th century. In the 16th century, Copernicus (and later Galileo and Kepler) knocked the earth out of the center of the cosmos. In the 18th, Scotsman James Hutton demolished Bishop Ussher's calculation that the earth began in 4004 b.c.e. when he discovered "deep time," that the earth was very old, billions of years old. Soon thereafter, Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) rendered the Genesis myth of a six-day Creation as simply silly. Now both earth and humanity could both be explained without any reference to a Creator God.

Add to that Freud's revelations about working of the human psyche and Marx's deconstruction of feudal industrialism. For religious liberals, salvation lay ever more a matter of rational consciousness, ethical living and social progress than in worshiping God. It became ever more difficult for free thinkers to find credible any belief in the personal God of the Bible. More and more, God seemed to be a fairy tale for the faint of heart, a superstitious refuge in times of calamity, and an explanation of last resort for those puzzled by life's immense mysteries.

But what really challenged Unitarian Universalists was the Great War to end all wars, the first World War. The Biblical God of Righteousness was claimed by both sides as millions died. The Universalist's God of Love, however noble it sounded before, proved to be a joke. Of course, with the Second World War and countless atrocities since, rational thinkers long since have been disabused of seeing God as an all-powerful and all-loving father figure who indifferently sits on the sidelines while we humans commit murder and mayhem. By the mid-20th century, deism and atheism began to appear ever more compelling to religious liberals. We were among many who argued, "God is dead."

Humanism Prevails among Unitarian Universalists

In the aftermath, humanism arose and built on the previous generation's notion that religion was about character. The middle-west continued to be the site of reformation in the Free Church. In 1933, Chicago philosopher Roy Wood Sellars wrote the Humanist Manifesto. Most of those who signed on were Unitarian and Universalist ministers. Sellars' essay is similar to Gannett's, more a series of propositions than a statement of belief. Here's a few of its assertions:

• The universe is self-existing and not created.
• (Humans are) a part of nature and a result of a continuous process.
• Modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural . . . guarantee of human values.
• Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant.

The Manifesto has been updated two times since. But in each, God is not included as central to the human quest for meaning and purpose. The important thing is for humans to take full responsibility for the choices we make and the lives we lead. As was said by an earlier generation, "deeds, not creeds."

By the time of the merger between the Universalists and the Unitarians in 1961 - when this church was first chartered - the prevailing "theology" among religious liberals was humanistic, tinged here and there with a vaguely pantheistic mysticism. Scientific materialism and ethical humanism became our world-view. Ever since, our faith has been especially characterized by a high degree of suspicion about supernatural claims, with a strong allergy to god-talk in any form.

That served us well for a while. But the "god" question would not go away. We could not put it down. In the 1970's a reconstruction of faith arose as feminists challenged the underlying patriarchal assumptions of Unitarian Universalism and called for an exploration into goddess religions. The objections to God, it was argued, are less about the divine per se than male dominance in Western society. Many among us turned to goddess religion as a way to re-explore our place in the cosmos and to tell a new "herstory."

Although, frankly, it baffles humanists and atheists, this opening of mind and heart to the divine feminine has become deeply enriching individually and institutionally (leading in 1985 to a total rewrite of our 1961 Principles!). Feminine consciousness continues to provoke yet further reformation of the free church. We continue to be radicals as we seek to create a modern faith that is both well grounded in reason and yet open to new ways of thinking about a life in the spirit.

Getting Beyond Arguments for or against God

This trip down memory lane brings me now to my claim that God, however represented, is at best problematic. As Buber warned, "we cannot purify or restore the word God." It is not at all clear we can ever pick it up off the ground, no matter how urgent our preoccupation! At present, we are riven still by word wars that generate more heat than light. The ongoing humanist/theist controversies among us do not serve us well. It is unclear whether there are things commonly believe among us. Perhaps we would be better off just to give it up, live and let live, leave the question of god or not god be a matter of personal struggle and invoke that the wise counsel of old: "We need not think alike to love alike."

In the notes to this sermon, you will find further arguments for or against the existence of god. My hunch is you will find none compelling or persuasive so as to alter your thinking. As Kierkegaard so ably demonstrated, you cannot "reason" your way to god. So, let me suggest now a way out of this mess.

Earlier I said most people's notion of God - for or against - strike me as puny, even picayune, not worth much attention. Both sides, pro and con, try to squeeze God into feeble categories of human understanding and imagination. And this is the problem: the names and characteristics we ascribe to God. We argue fruitlessly that God is this, God is that - or not. In this devout Jews are wise. They refuse even to utter God's name. As God's names are not God, better not to have any images of God.

So, let's try that. What happens if, instead, we take all the things people say about God and simply reject them? Then what? Try it, make a list. What words would you use, positive or negative, to describe God? For instance, you might describe God like this:

Now, reject every one of them. They're all wrong. Do it again. What else can be said. You'll have to work at it a bit.

Now, throw every one of them away, too, as simply inept. Do it again. And again. What then? In a manner similar to a zen koan, at the point at which "reason" runs dry, something curious happens. Out of the exhausted void, something new emerges. It is both awe inspiring and awe-ful.

Nikos Kazantzakis, in his wonderful novel, Report to Greco, describes the experience: "Then I too began to discern the eternal, immutable face of God behind all religious symbols. And still later, when my mind grew overbroad and my heart overbold, I began to discern something behind God's face as well - chaos, a terrifying, uninhabited darkness."

When we strip away our naivete about God and how we use the term, after we have dwelt in the nothingness, we can then form a secondary innocence. We can pick up the sad old word knowing our propositions will never fully edify. Then, we discover in a new way that all our words and stories are at best pointers. They are not ends in themselves. We can lay aside all our word wars. Simultaneously we can deny and affirm. Thus, we can speak about that of which nothing can be said. God does not exist. God is all there is. Awful and awe-full!

I'm willing to bet, you're not satisfied. That's good. That's why this remains a conversation and not a dictation. Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) remarked, "Some people say there is a God; others say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere in between." And with that cheery note, I leave you to try this experiment. Let me hear what comes up, or not. Just keep asking, my friends, just keep asking. Blessings. Amen.

1. Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a Viennese Jewish philosopher and religious leader who translated the Old Testament into German. He was a cultural Zionist. His most famous work is I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958) and the likely source for this quotation.

2. Annie Farnsworth is a Maine poet, a mom, and a Reiki Master.

3. Source: The American Heritage Dictionary.

4. Western and Eastern religious traditions hold to belief in all kinds of Gods. My dinner companions' question reflects the triumph of Hebraic monotheism, equating the tribal god "El" (also known as Yahweh) with the "very god of very gods," a first God above all other gods. The list is quite large and I refer the reader to the Encyclopedia Mythica for a handy catalogue (see http://www.pantheon.org/). The gods referenced here are:

• Zeus: Greek god, supreme ruler of Mount Olympus and of the gods who resided there (cf. the Roman god, Jupiter)
• Thor: Norse god of thunder.
• Diana: Roman goddess of fertility.
• Demeter: Greek goddess of the harvest.
• Ahura Mazda: the supreme god of Persia, the "Lord Wisdom."
• Allah: In pre-Islamic pagan culture among Arabs, the name for the supreme God. Today, the Islamic name for God (arguably the same God worshiped by Jews and Christians).
• Vishnu: preserver of the universe, linked to Brahma, the creator, and Shiva, the destroyer of the universe.
• Parvati: Shiva's consort and goddess of love.

5.The phrase originates in The Essays (1575) of the French Renaissance skeptic Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). His words are: "Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozens"

6.A few years ago, Unitarian Universalist Association President William Sinkford unwittingly unleashed a firestorm of protest by calling for Unitarian Universalists to re-examine the "language of reverence." He was accused of trying to lead the Association to irrational, supernatural, superstition. Across the country, angry exchanges occurred as though "reverence" were some kind of spiritual plague.

Several humanist members assured me that I need not bow down to this oppression from "headquarters." As I have never felt any pressure at any time in my ministry, I found the statement strange, even paranoid, a sad evidence of our irrational superstition about words per se. Yet, some of my colleagues have questioned whether they can remain part of the Association if "reverence" is part of our work.

7. See my January 8, 2006 sermon: "Redefining Christianity - From Savior to Exemplar." Printed copies may be found in the church narthex or on-line at: www.uucfm.org.

8. "Biblical criticism is a form of Historical Criticism that seeks to analyze the Bible through asking certain questions of the text, such as: Who wrote it? When was it written? To whom was it written? Why was it written? What was the historical, geographical, and cultural setting of the text? How well preserved is the original text? How unified is the text? What sources were used by the author? How was the text transmitted over time? What is the text's genre and from what sociological setting is it derived? When and how did it come to become part of the Bible?"

Biblical criticism has been traditionally divided into lower criticism, also called textual criticism, that seeks to establish the original text out of the variant readings of ancient manuscripts, and higher criticism that focuses on identifying the author, date, and place of writing for each book of the Bible. In the twentieth-century a number of specific critical methodologies have been developed to address such questions in greater depth."

9. Even today most people think of the Bible's 66 books as a unified "book" that was "revealed" whole cloth. In truth, it is a collection of disparate books (the word "bible" comes from the same Latin route as bibliography, meaning simply a collection) containing the history of the Jews, legends and poetry. The Hebrew scriptures (which Christians call the "Old Testament") date back to roughly 2000 b.c.e. and the story of Abraham. The Torah, or the Books of Moses, do not appear until 800 or so years later.

The Christian scriptures (called a "New Testament" by Christians to declare Christianity as a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy) date roughly from the latter half of the first century to the middle of the second century of the common era (i.e., "c.e."). They contain the four gospel stories of Jesus' life and ministry, the "acts" of his followers or apostles, and the letters of Paul and other early church organizers.

Contemporary biblical scholarship has demonstrated these books to be a most complex collection, rarely with an author in the sense we moderns think when someone's name appears on a book. The three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), for example, were not written by the disciples for whom they are named. Textual criticism shows there were several writers and editors who inserted material to meet local considerations.

10. Some simple definitions might help the reader:

• Theism (including one or many gods) is the belief that God/s or Goddess/es is/are actively involved in maintaining the Universe. This is the "god of history" and the object of most worship and prayer. Invoking the name of the god/dess brings it into dialogue with humans.
• Deism is the doctrine that God created the world but does not interact with it; it echoes the Hebraic idea that God is "wholly other" or transcendent. Here there is no need to pray or worship as neither would effect anything.
• Pantheism (sometimes also known as religious naturalism)is the belief that the world is identical to God. God is "in" everything. This teaching emphasizes God's intimate proximity or immanence, as suggested by the popular hymn, "he walks with me and talks with me..." It contrasts with -
• Pan-en-theism, a belief that the world is "in" God. This makes God is something greater than just the world, and its foundational or constitutional support. Less formally, God is like a bowl and everything rests in it.
• Atheism refers to the doctrine that there is no God or gods, or to an absence of belief in the existence of God or gods.

11. Transcendentalism was a broadly reaching movement of ideas and writings that suggest there is an ideal spiritual state that "transcends" the physical, empirical world. This state is known by an intuitive awareness found in the individual's own life experience.

Its mood is summarized in Emerson's famous dicta: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius. ... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." R.W. Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841.

12. William Channing Gannett (1840 - 1923) was the son of Ezra Stiles Gannett, colleague and successor to William Ellery Channing, founder of American Unitarianism. While serving in Minnesota, he formed the Unity club, which became the springboard for a new variant of Unitarian religion, best characterized today as ethical naturalism.

Here is the full text of Things Commonly Believed Among Us, proposed by at the Western Unitarian Conference, 1887, as an attempt to consolidate the new thought:

• We believe that to love the Good and to live the Good is the supreme thing in religion;
• We hold reason and conscience to be final authorities in matters of religious belief;
• We honor the Bible and all inspiring scripture, old and new;
• We revere Jesus, and all holy souls that have taught men truth and righteousness and love, as prophets of religion;
• We believe in the growing nobility of Man; We trust the unfolding Universe as beautiful, beneficent, unchanging Order; to know this order is truth; to obey it is right and liberty and stronger life;
• We believe that good and evil invariably carry their own recompense, no good thing being failure and no evil thing success; that heaven and hell are states of being; that no evil can befall the good man in either life or death; that all things work together for the victory of the Good;
• We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all;
• We believe that this self-forgetting, loyal life awakes in man the sense of union here and now with things eternal - the sense of deathlessness; and this sense is to us an earnest of the life to come;
• We worship One-in All -- that life whence suns and starts derive their orbits and the soul of man its Ought, -- that Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the sons of God, -- that Love with which ours souls commune.
• Ethics thought out is religious thought; ethics felt out is religious feeling, and ethics lived out is the religious life.

13. James Ussher (1581-1656) was the Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin. Highly regarded in his day as a scholar, he established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 b.c.e. Ussher also calculated that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 b.c.e., and that Noah's ark landed on Mt Ararat on 5 May 2348 b.c.e., 'a Wednesday.'

Today scientists believe the earth is roughly 4.6 billion years in a cosmos about 13 billion year old.

14. James Hutton (1726 - 1797) was a Scottish geologist. In his 1785 Theory of the Earth, he argued that geologic phenomena are the result of existing forces having operated uniformly from the origin of the earth to the present time. In contrast to the Noah flood story, he claimed that mountains are caused by terrestrial heat. He is considered by many to be the father of modern geology.

Charles Robert Darwin (1809 -1882) was a British naturalist. His Origin of Species (1859) proposed the theory that all living species could be accounted for by understanding life as successive stages of adaptation over very long periods of time. He did not use the phrase, but evolutionary theory today is an integral component of biology.

15. Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939), Austrian neurologist, was the founder of the psychoanalysis. His theory claims that unconscious desires drive much of our behavior and that religion itself was an "illusion."

Karl Marx (1818 - 1883), German born philosopher and political economist, is known for his analysis of history as the constant struggles between classes. His "communism" rested on one of the teachings of Jesus: "From each according to one's ability, to each according to one's need."

Regrettably, Marx' lofty ambitions were perverted by Lenin's embrace of state totalitarianism as the alternative to industrial capitalism - a contest now clearly won by the latter throughout the world, for good or ill.

16. Boston Unitarian cleric, James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) captured the unbridled optimism of our faith in this era in his book The Progress of Mankind. Clarke proclaimed five points of Unitarian faith, most notably the last:

• The Fatherhood of God.
• The Brotherhood of Man.
• The Leadership of Jesus.
• Salvation by Character.
• The Progress of Mankind, onward and upward forever.

17. The great French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace (1749 - 1827), when asked by Napoleon why he had not mentioned God in his Celestial Mechanique, reportedly replied, [Sire,] je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothčse." "[No, Sire,] I had no need of that hypothesis." For many, God is an explanation or hypothesis of first and last resort for things they cannot or do not understand.

The history of religious ideas in the West has been a steady turn away from such thinking, looking instead to the natural sciences to account for the phenomena we encounter. Nonetheless, our human need for "some reason" to explain things leads many to invoke God as that final reason. This is called "the god of the gaps," a filler for what we cannot explain.

It takes courage to say, "I do not know" when, say, one is faced with mystery or a terrible loss. Even Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) had trouble with the enigmas of inexplicable mystery. Disturbed by Werner Heisenberg's (1901-1976) Uncertainty Principle, Einstein supposedly said, "God does not play at dice."

Is God ever anything more than an hypothesis?

18. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is responsible for the phrase, "God is dead." In his The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche laments that God has ceased to be a force in the people's lives. (This is the "death" referred to, not any physical dying of deity.)

Practically, it can be said that even "believers" are "functional atheists" much of the time - invoking God, perhaps, but living as though all of life depends solely on their own effort. In this way, God as a living partner to life is dead to one's mind, heart and soul.

The so-called "death of God" movement in theology was a major intellectual force in the 1960's and gave impetus to the humanistic/atheistic tendencies of contemporary Unitarian Universalism.

Nietzsche also said, "Which is it: is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?"

19. I'll explore humanism more thoroughly in an up-coming sermon, Redefining Humanism - Proclaiming Religious Naturalism, February 19, 2006.

20. John Dietrich in Minneapolis, Curtis Reese in Des Moines, and Francis Potter in Kansas City were the leading Unitarian ministers giving voice to the new "religious humanism" in the years after the First World war.

21. The full texts for Humanist Manifestos I (1933), II (1973), and III (2003) may be found at The American Humanist Association's web site: http://www.americanhumanist.org/humanism/.

22. Scientific materialism is itself a belief system, which asserts that all reality is physical (matter and energy). It specifically rejects appeals to "higher realities" and considers spiritual substance as a delusion. Proponents argue there are no spiritual truths independent of the physical world. Consequently, consciousness is explained as an emergent phenomenon of the physical brain, implying there is no "soul."

You don't have to be an atheist to subscribe to this thinking - for you could hold to God in the manner of pantheism, equating God with the physical universe.

23. This god-talk is a real problem for Unitarian Universalist preachers. Once, I gave a sermon entitled, "The Something More of the Universe," appealing to the possibility that there were mysteries we did not yet understand but which were the content or objects mystics invoked when they spoke of God behind and beyond the metaphors and symbols of speech. This elicited a hostile note telling me to "get rid of all that blankety-blank god-@% #$."

On another occasion, I challenged goddess religion by stating that it did not seem to me to be much of an improvement to replace a male-god of doubtful character and distant estate with a female goddess of equally doubtful character and distant estate. This brought forth the rage of several women who accused me of being disrespectful of their humanity and their beliefs.

This last notion captures, however, the suspicion among atheists and humanists. Non-believers criticize the idea that recovering the ancient goddess practices, casting them in modern dress, and invoking her name/s is but a retreat into the same anthropological narcissism that again posits that humans are somehow the center of all that matters.

24. These words are attributed to Ferenc Dávid (Francis David) (1510 - 1579), founder of European Unitarian religion. He was the lead preacher in the city of Kolozsvár, bishop of the Hungarian churches in Transylvania, and appointed court preacher to John Sigismund (1540 - 1571), prince of Transylvania (today northwestern Romania).

As a non-creedal faith community, premised solely on our desire to "walk together in covenant," there are some questions with which we will always struggle. To the extent we even try to reduce these ineffable questions to single answers, we engage in a divisive intolerance and a peculiarly oppressive Puritan fundamentalism.

25. Wise thinkers have struggled a long time to make rational sense of God. The primary arguments are thus:

• Ontological: Premised on pure reason, it argues that since we can imagine a perfect being about which nothing is greater, God must exist. This reasoning conceives God as foundational to existence itself. It's not a very compelling argument. To be sure, I can imagine blue elephants but that doesn't mean they, in fact, do exist. There is no link in my thinking of a perfect being and there being such. Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) is the Christian theologian who first proposed this argument.
• Causal or Cosmic: argues that everything has a cause or antecedent and, therefore, there must be a First Cause, in Aristotle's (384 - 322 b.c.e.) words, the Unmoved Mover. It's the belief inherent in the question, "Well, what was there before the Big Bang? Surely something." To say "nothing" just goes against all our notions of common sense.

  In a real sense, the question fails to understand basic physics which asserts that space-time is an interdependent continuum. Before something emerged out of nothing, there was, simply put, no time. The question of what was "before" is nonsensical. A similar statement can be made of what comes "after" time.

• Argument from Design or Teleological. This is the most familiar and appealing of all. It argues that we can read the nature of the divine (its quality and purpose) by studying the book of nature. This is the premise of the latest flap against neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.

  The argument from design says everywhere we look, we find order. Order does not or cannot happen randomly; therefore, there must be an order-maker. This is the God as clock-maker argument. Many find it compelling and disdain the skeptics who say that order either spontaneously emerges - such as when a crystal forms - or is a matter of our poetic imagination - as in finding Moses among the zucchini. It's lasting appeal is found in the phrase, "there must be some reason . . ." We cannot abide an ab-surd (without reason) existence. Absent any real reason, we make one up and call it God.

  The classic version of this reasoning appears in Englishman William Paley's (1743 - 1805) Natural Theology in 1802. Paley draws this analogy: "Since watches are the products of intelligent design, and living things are like watches in having complicated mechanisms which serve a purpose (e.g., having eyeballs to enable sight), living things are probably the products of intelligent design as well."

• Moral: In the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevski (1821 - 1881) unleashed a theological storm by declaring, if god is dead, then all is permitted. The moral argument for God asserts that there are objective and universal standards of goodness essential to human living. Since they generally do occur, God must be the source of these standards.

  Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) put it this way, "Two things move the human soul, the starry heavens above and the moral order within." In this phrasing is the linkage of heaven and earthly morality. However, a careful study finds more chaos and randomness than order and there is nothing in the natural order that guarantees human values are God's. Moreover, one is hard-pressed to document the claim that there are objective "absolute" values that transcend cultures and ages.

Additionally, two other arguments emerge that are compelling but refuse the discipline of either evidence or logic. They are:

• Pragmatic, also known as Pascal's Wager after the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662): Apart from whether we humans can ever evidence God's existence, It is best to believe it so because, a) if god exists and you believe, you win; b) if god exists and you don't believe, you lose; c) if god does not exist and you believe, you don't lose anything; and d) if you don't believe and if there is no god, you don't win or lose. Therefore, playing the odds, it is wiser to believe.

  As Einstein asserted, God does not play at dice with the universe; therefore, better to believe than not. Well and good, but it is circular reasoning at best. It may be of comfort but there is nothing rationally compelling about the "wager."

• Experiential. The last, and most difficult, is the argument from experience. Around the world, people assert there is a reality, a force, a being, or a process that is beyond our normal, natural experience, yet accessible to us. They call this something many names, but God is the unifying phrase.

  This "something" is expressed in cultural motifs, most commonly in anthropomorphic form. It proponents claim that - based on their personal experience - there must be a (potentially) shared common link between the divine or God and human hope or fear.

  The challenge to the skeptic, of course, is what sense to make of such claims. It is far too simplistic and frankly disrespectful to those who believe to say they are delusional - although that may indeed be the case. How will we ever know?

An argument against God's existence: This arguments demands that words mean what they mean. The word and category "existence" denotes those objects that are present at some "time." God, by most definitions, is "ever lasting" or eternal - that is not bound by time. If God is timeless, then whatever God is, it cannot "exist."

26. Sřren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) was a Danish theologian, often credited as among the first "existentialists." He struggled mightily to make Christianity reason-able. Finally, he gave up and declared that faith comes, with fear and trembling, in a giant "leap of faith" - a trusting that it is so, beyond logical proof. God becomes real only when we believe.

This leads to re-framing God, not as a proposition of the intellect that can be rationally validated, bur rather as a partner or companion in which one has trust and confidence.

Further, moving beyond the dominant thought of God as some kind of being which we can know objectively, "process theologians" speak of God as a verb, not a noun, an "in order to" rather than a "cause of." The Spanish existential philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) puts it this way:

• Faith consists not so much . . . in believing what we have not seen as in creating what we do not see."

This latter notion rests in Alfred North Whitehead's (1861- 1947) assertion there are no "things" in the universe, only "events" or relationships - which in quantum theory requires that objects (potential reality merely) to be observed by a subject (also one of many probabilities) in order to create "reality." By this thinking, God depends on being believed in as much as being human requires a God to imagine us. Puzzled? That's ok. It's the subject of a future sermon.

27. In theological parlance, there are two ways to think about God. The more familiar is called the via positiva. This is what I'm suggesting is so troubling. In this method, the ambition is to come up with just the proper set of propositions to help us make sense of God. Hence, religions around the world make assertions: "God is . . ." How you complete that sentence then becomes an important part of your religious sensibility.

The via negativa, illustrated here, is equally old and highly regarded in many circles, particularly among mystics. Instead of asserting propositions comparable to factual declarations, the goal is to strip away all human categories, to come to the divine free of our cultural and intellectual, even experiential expectations. This is to know God rather than to believe in God.