So says PZ Myers, reflecting on
an interview with Elaine Pagels at salon.com:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/04/hiding_from_religious_reality.php Certainly many people talk about God as an ineffable presence. But if you try to explain what transcendence is, can you put that into words and explain what it means?
People have put it into words, but the words are usually metaphors or poems or hymns. Even the word "God" is a metaphor, or "the son of God," or "Father." They're all simply images for some other order of reality.
Vacuous nonsense, air and fluff, excuses and evasions, nothing at all. Those seem to be our choices in this widely spread argument: the ridiculous anthropomorphic personal entity of the Rick Warren majority, or the etiolated and pointless vapor of the theological intellectuals. Common inanity vs. rarefied insipidity. The Lucky Charms leprechaun vs. invisible fairies in the garden.
I choose none of the above. The nonexistence of any of these idiotic fictions is the only choice that makes any sense.