When we hear the word "God", most people immediately jump to the Judeo-Christian God, all-good, all-knowing, and that created everything and still creates everything that exists. This is not the God that you encounter when you start from a philosophical perspective; generally the first god you encounter is the god that made the first thing, from which everything else flows. Like the man that created a factory machine, that then goes on to automatically create a part on its own.
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But this circles back to the initial question, which is what an atheist or areligious person would need to believe that there is any god. Not the all-good, omniscient/omnipotent God, but any god whatsoever. If we define god as the first cause, would the Big Bang be God? If we go by "traditional" definitions of God, the only thing that would change my opinion would be death.
I think we can make a further distinction by talking about three standpoints in relating to God. These are the 1st-person, 2nd-person, and 3rd-person, or the I, You/We, and It.
In the Bible, Jesus demonstrated these three perspectives by speaking
as God, speaking
to God, and speaking
about God. The statement "I am God, but God is also greater than me," comes from this three-perspective understanding. I would add that Jesus considered himself the example, and not the exception. There really is some subversive stuff in there when you don't water it down with traditional interpretations.
I think we can categorize a First Cause as an it-object, a 3rd-person God. Gaia is another, as is the great Web of Existence, the beautiful metaphorical image from Eastern tradition of the universe as a network of crystals, each containing the reflection of all the others. The Tao is a 3rd-person understanding of God.
And I think there is a hidden spirituality among atheists: I've seen many on FB posting quotes from Carl Sagan or other astronomers about how we are all stardust, and how the atoms of our bodies will outlive our unique bodyminds. There is a distinct sense of wonder and awe at the unimaginable complexity of the universe and its functioning, and there is a perception of a grand existence much greater than we can understand.
I would say that these people already believe in God, not as a Thou or Other, and not as a divine Self, but as a great Mystery, a Web of Being. Which would make the original question moot for many. You find this same type of "It-spirituality" among quantum physicists.
Then we get into the idea of God being good and loving human beings, which philosophically isn't a given - there's no reason why a God has to exist that is completely good, and no reason why God has to love humans or other creatures.
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And, if the Judeo-Christian God is so all-good and all-merciful as the religious claim he is, he would understand my viewpoint and allow me time to come to believe in him in the afterlife before sending me off to burn eternally for being too logical.
You're diving deep into metaphysical assumptions here, and that simply will not do in the post/modern world. The reason why Jesus' understanding of God is so much different from the understanding of those around him, and even of those who live today, is partly because his understanding was grounded in experience and not in theories or assumptions. He experienced God, and what he concretely felt was an infinite, boundless, unconditional love for everyone and everything.
Jesus' teachings which have been pretty thoroughly mangled over the years. But when you read the non-canonical book The Gospel of Thomas, you can begin to see these teachings in a way that is free from traditional metaphysical baggage. Which is partly because the writer eschews tradition from the start, in favor of deeper truths. In this book, Jesus' saying seem to be intended to 'snap!' the reader out of all theoretical concepts and into a direct experience of the world, much like the Zen masters of the East.
The other reason that Jesus' understanding of God was different, and this is really very important, is that Jesus did not have a mythic-membership or traditional worldview. Jesus was not even at the rational or pluralistic level. It can be shown pretty clearly that Jesus' worldview was integral or deeper. And the reason that the punishing, vengeful, image of God is still around today is that there are still - and always will be - people at the warrior and traditional levels. Even when people have an altered-state experience of love and unity, when they return to their normal state of consciousness, that experience is going to be interpreted according to that person's worldview.
A lot of what appears to be conflict between religious and non-religious folk is actually conflict between pre-rational and rational or post-rational worldviews. Each worldview has is own truth claim, and
when we seem to argue whether religion is right or science is right, usually we are actually arguing whether tradition and authority determine what is true, or whether logic and reasoning determine what is true.
I think it should be obvious at this point that religion exists on the same developmental spectrum as everything else, from warrior to mythic to rational and beyond (which I say using myself as an example of thoroughly non-traditional Christianity). And before we judge the traditional worldview too harshly for not being modern, we ought to remember how we got to modernity in the first place. From Wilber's 'Integral Spirituality':
"... about 50,000 years ago, the
magenta value structure (magical-animistic) was about the highest that humanity had evolved at that time. But certain highly evolved individuals began to push into new and creative modes of being and knowing, and they began making responses from a higher level of complexity and consciousness. As more and more individuals shared those responses, the
red value structure (egocentric, power) began to be laid down as a Kosmic habit. The more it was laid down, the more fixed it became.
Around 10,000 BCE, as the red value structure dominated humanity's responses [to its environment], a few heroic individuals began pushing into a response that involved more consciousness, more awareness, more complexity - and the
amber value structure (absolutistic, ethnocentric) began to be laid down for the first time.
In terms of worldviews, this move from red magic to amber mythic involved the creation of extensive systems of mythology that, whatever else they did, allowed the creation of much more complex social systems. Magic could only unify, or socially unite, humans based on blood-lineage and kinship ties. Unless you were related to me by blood, there was no way we could create a "we," and thus, at magic, tribes could not be united with each other socially or culturally.
But one of the functions of myths is that, in claiming to be descended from a God not of blood and genetics but of values and beliefs,
mythology could unite vast numbers of humans and nonkinship tribes if they all adopted belief in the same mythic God: everybody can believe in that God, even if they are not blood-related."
Even today, mythology - or shared values and beliefs - have the greatest power to unite the tribes that exist in the third world, and the street gangs of urban society. Mythology is the necessary first step to rationality. That is the path set forth by thousands of years of Kosmic habit. Trying to get to reason without myth is like cutting off your legs in an attempt to fly.
I know this post is already lengthy, but in light of the meaning and function of myth, I want to touch on something very quickly. There is a common theme in the responses to the two questions in the first post, and that theme is "show us the
evidence". The rational mind puts evidence and scientific inquiry above myth and authority, which allows people of varying mythological traditions to find common ground, in much the same way that shared beliefs and values are uniting the tribes of today.
