Atheist Versus Theist: A Middle Ground

Andrew Sullivan's been having an ongoing dialogue with Sam Harris on faith and religion, theist versus atheist, which I haven't read. These kinds of things bore the pants off of me. I've found that fiction deals with such questions in much more subtle and illuminating ways.

The point being, of course, that gods as a class are more or less beyond description, even my gods, which exist wholly within the universe and suffer their own limits. I do, however, recognize them as personifications, abstractions that represent things I don't understand and can't describe. It's an idea that echoes in the literature of the fantastic regularly: gods exist because we create them. I'm not at all uncomfortable with that because I don't expect them to be micromanaging things. There's already a system in place.

Consequently, this bit that Sullivan quotes from H. L. Mencken struck me as particularly apt. I noted yesterday my label for "wonder." I like to throw those things in periodically because I think the universe is a wonderful and awesome place, and I'm a pretty rational guy. (Too rational, sometimes.) I like that little bit of uncertainty -- one of my favorite mythological types is the Trickster, be it Raven, Brer Rabbit, Loki or Anansi -- and I think the universe must be a sadly impoverished place for those who know all the answers.

(Footnote: Right now I'm reading Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's The Coyote Road, short stories based on the Trickster gods. Some good stuff -- Delia Sherman has demonstrated herself to be a master of dialect, and I'm running into a number of other authors that I've only become aware of recently with some wonderful contributions. Eventually, there will be a review at GMR. And isn't that coyote the sexiest thing you've ever seen? I want one. Those eyes -- reminds me of my upstairs neighbor, but he has longer lashes.)