Part of our discussion was centered on the potential existence of some form of divine being.  She made a couple of statements that I wanted to follow up on.  She first of all said that she wanted to believe in a divine entity out there.  Secondly, she stated that one of the things that really ticked her off about theists was that they were so insistent in their various ways that their God was the right God and her God was the wrong God.  My God is not necessarily the same as your God, she stated.  

Interesting places to start.  Once a person indicates that they believe that a divine entity is possible (not a scientific impossibility since we haven't discovered measurable traces of such a being, which is the very narrow way that many non-theists want to approach the issue), we have room to begin talking.

The first issue I wanted to clarify was whether or not she was a polytheist.  If her God and my God are not the same, is she positing that there are a multitude of gods out there - potentially one god for every single person if not more - and that all these gods are actually gods without any form of hierarchy of potency?  No.  She was pretty quick to dismiss that idea.  A polytheistic universe didn't make sense to her, and it doesn't make sense to me.  Particularly because my idea of what defines God is that God is the creator of everything else.  If you created everything there is, you're God.  If you didn't, you're not.  That's a fairly consistent Biblical standard for godness.

I wanted to clarify further.  If she didn't believe that there were a multitude of gods out there, how could she make the statement that her God is not the same as my God?  Because your idea of God is just a messed up version of my God, she replied half in jest.  No problem.  Now I know that we're discussing a single God, and that she is arguing that there are better or worse (accurate and less accurate)  understandings of this one God.  That's a huge series of steps forward in a discussion like this.  

The next question is, how does she know this?  How does she know that my understanding of God is just a messed up understanding of her God - who remains the only God out there?  We got stuck on this for a bit, and then I clarified further. Is God knowable?  We both agreed that a God could be knowable in part, but any God worth his title wouldn't be knowable in totality by what he had created.  The finite cannot encompass intellectually the infinite.  That's a pretty logical assertion.  Her example of this was that if there were a universe of two-dimensional creatures, and they encountered a sphere, they'd never know about the third dimension of that circle because they were only capable of experiencing two rather than three dimensions.

Awesome.  This is a pretty clear and clean argument against Gervais and others who insist that they will only believe in God if they can measure him somehow.  It is not illogical to say that God would be something that we can't scientifically measure, unless your assumption is that we can and will know everything there is to know about everything - that we are not, in fact, finite in our understanding.  While Gervais doesn't go there in his essay, he might as well, since that's what he is effectively insisting.  If God exists, we would be able to track him down and verify it.  We're that good.

So now in the discussion we have a situation where we are in agreement that there might be a God, and that it is reasonable to assume there would only be one God, and that this God is in some fashion knowable - enough to the extent that people can apparently have better or worse understandings or comprehensions of him.  In other words, God can be experienced, but he can be experienced either accurately or inaccurately.  Awesome.  This is an excellent way of discussing the relationship of all the world's religions.  They aren't all equivalent or pointing towards the same truth.  But they very likely represent differing (and more and less accurate) attempts to describe something they have experienced.

The question now becomes, if God can exist, if there's only one of Him, and if He can be experienced - if His creation can experience Him in some fashion and recognize that they've just experienced something way out of their league, can God control that encounter.

Can God in fact, reveal Himself to His creation in a meaningful way - and more specifically, in such a way and at such a level that His creation can understand what it is that He is trying to reveal about Himself?  This is where our conversation ended, unfortunately.  But it's a great place to pick up the discussion again in the future, I pray!

Ok...time for a meeting.  I'll continue when I get back!