I've tried to listen to people in these sorts of conversations, but it just gets frustrating when someone tells me that they believe in God, I ask them what they mean by "God", they give some incoherent reply, and then they get all upset as if their inability express themselves is my fault. It gets old.
I wanted to try to respond a bit more to this, and by "this" I mean the general problem of definitions, or the attitude of skepticism towards approaches to the question about 'God' that deny the possibility of giving a conceptually univocal or comprehensive definition. It seems to me that there's a suspicion that this is more a matter of obfuscation or an attempt to avoid criticism on the part of theists than a defensible position or a reasonable approach (c.f. the entire discussion on agnomists). So I'd like to suggest an analogy, and I don't think it's perfect, and I'll point out some of the weak points, but maybe it's useful:
The analogy would compare theological conceptions of the Divine to the cosmological theory of dark matter. Conceptually, "dark matter" is hypothetical. We don't directly observe it, but we infer that there is
something (which isn't necessarily even matter, i.e not necessarily a "thing") which explains the divergence between the predictions of our very well established models of gravity and our actual observations of gravitational effects in space. If you ask, "what is dark matter?" the answer will be that we don't know, but we infer certain things, because it must account for the gravitational effects. But if there's a discussion about whether not dark matter is a "thing" (i.e a previously unknown fundamental particle, say, or the product of an undiscovered force), or if you were to require a more concrete account in order to consider the possibility of a real referent of the term "dark matter", you'd be left frustrated.
Now the weakness of the analogy is that, whatever ultimately explains the problem which we refer to by speaking of dark matter, it will necessarily be modeled by physics using the same mathematical and theoretical techniques that are used throughout physics. We don't know what dark matter is, but there is not necessarily any question of the answer being unknowable. So it is not a perfect analogy for the intuition about the ineffable, the unknowable. But if you consider both science and theology, not as making proclamations of an absolute truth, but of conveying a human wisdom within their own limits (methodologically, epistemologically, and etc) there is still a parallel, if an inexact one. This is not an argument for the existence of God, it's an attempt to explain why some of us in this thread are offering descriptions of a divine dimension of reality, that we infer (conceptually) from experience, or from the universality of mystical tradition, and yet maintain that we do not know what "it" is. In the same way that "dark matter" is a phrase that refers more to a problematic, an unresolved question, than to something known in a definitive way, so I would say the word "God", in its broadest connotations, also refers to a human existential questioning, an intuition and experience which people have nearly universally felt compelled to question and seek an understanding of. The universality of certain "mystical" insights is not a proof of any specific theory about the nature of the divine, but it's compelling evidence at least that there is some human phenomena that is interesting.
What is the nature of the referent of the word? Is it a Supreme Being who creates the world out of nothing? Is it no more than a quirk of human neurology and a side-effect of evolution? I don't know. I can't prove it. It is a rationally defensible position to reject that it could have a referent of the first kind, or to reject any referent that transcends human subjectivity, but I think it's interesting that a more or less pure rationalism still is involved in the same kind of existential question. What is the highest principle of human experience? Or of life? The apotheosis of reason is a different kind of answer to the existential question that is bound up in the problem of "God", but it is related to the theistic modes at least insofar as they are considering a similar problem.
Following millennia of human wisdom I choose to refer to an element of my own experience, and of human experience which I hear those traditions speaking of, as "divine", and I use words like the Ineffable, or Infinite, or Spirit, or talk about an awareness that seems to transcend both the senses and pure reason, or I speak of love, compassion, fullness, or of Brahman, or Sunyata, or any of dozens of different (and mutually incompatible! at least as religious systems) symbols that try to speak to the experience. Ultimately, my argument for the value of this is not an objective demonstration of the truth of a particular conceptual model, but the value I find in it in my own life, which is not a question so much of knowledge as of fullness of life. But I don't go so far as to extrapolate from this that you cannot have a meaningful life as an atheist. It's not really an argument, it's an attempt to share, for whatever value there may be in it.
