What is the best analogy of God? Is God a loving, personal god that listens to and answers every prayer? Is God simply a creator who has otherwise abandoned the creation? Or, is God something in between?
Let me start out with an assumption: there is a god, or possibly at least one god. If we agree to the presumption that God created the heavens and the earth (aka the material and immaterial), then it is clear that God is outside of this universe. If that is true, then there is no proof of god we can create to prove one way or another of the existence of God. Our proofs are limited to our understanding based on the universe and not what is beyond it. We cannot measure God with material logic, for material logic is part of God's creation and not part of the realm of God. We cannot prove God exists using immaterial logic, for that too is equally limited. All we can do is simply choose to believe or not believe. I choose to believe.
I believe there is a God (or possibly more than one). That god is outside of our realm of existence. I'm not going so far as to say God doesn't interact with this realm. A person may write a message on a piece of paper. The person is not the paper, but can still interact with it.
So: God exists. God created this universe. God is able to interact with this universe. With the one main assumption, we can say a few things about God. Yes, I realize the other two statements contain some amount of assumption, but the amount of assumptions is rapidly coming to an end. For example, I can say God is able to interact with this universe because people throughout history have identified the divine involvement in a significant way. I'm willing to discount "every claim" of divine intervention as some of them could be explained away with simple natural phenomena or random chance. The fact that different cultures in widely different geographical locations all talk about a divinity and that divine being interacting with this world suggests that it is more reasonable to believe God can interact with this universe than not.
It even suggests that it has happened. Now then, does that mean God answers all our prayers? No. I'm not implying we can come to that statement yet, or ever. God can, and has, interacted with this universe? Yes. I can even go so far as to state that God has interacted with this universe in such a manner that humans have observed God's involvement. So... how frequently? Daily? I don't think so. I don't see God answering everyone's prayers. As a child, I asked God for a million dollars. I never got it. Does that mean God answered my prayer with a "no", or did God simply ignore/not hear my prayer? Either is equally likely.
Let's consider the lesson about God we can gain from both interpretations. If God said "no", then God is not really good at communication. Honestly, I asked many times with no apparent response. I would have thought that if God were to answer my prayer for a million dollars, I would expect that answer to be in a format I would understand. Imagine a grandparent talking to a teenager on the phone. The teenager is asking their grandparent to give them an expensive car for free. Would you say the grandparent is answering back if the teenager sees and hears nothing from the grandparent? What if the grandparent responds with having a cloud pass by outside the teenager's home after asking for a car. Would that be answering in a manner they teenager would understand as a response?
Then again, did God simply ignore me and my prayers? This is the more likely answer, but it doesn't address the individuals throughout history where God did answer, or more often, God contacted a person. In general, I think there is a good argument against God responding to a person's prayer/request using the laws of averages and the chance that the outcome would have happened without the prayer. But what about those times when God reached out to people?
There are not many of them, but they do seem to happen over the history of mankind. I'm lumping in all the religions as it can be argued that a religion is simply a culture's form of expression to describe a God's interaction with that culture. I'm not so shortsighted as to believe that God waited until the jews or christians to show up in a region before God began to interact with that geographical region. If God created a person who converted to "the faith", did God create that person's parents and other ancestors? If so, then wouldn't it be reasonable that God created all of mankind? Why then, would God limit his conversation to just one or two cultural groups when those people had no way to communicate God's message to the world of people? Occam's razor says that is not reasonable. Were all the non-jews and christians doing everything perfectly fine before jew and christians showed up such that God didn't need to send them a message? Did God decide to wait multiple generations of people, thousands of years, to tell another culture of people what God wanted people to know about? It is far more reasonable to suggest God talked to other cultures and people using that culture's knowledge and understanding to get the message across. Looking at the evidence of God's involvement, it seems that is is an intermittent involvement with one person at a time (or a very small segment of people).
So, where are we? God exists (an assumption). God often does not respond to prayers. God does contact people with a message. It is not frequent (certainly not constant). We, and this universe is God's creation. It is unlikely that God created the universe to simply ignore it entirely. So, God has some interest in this universe and its outcome.
At the core of God's message, repeated to different cultures at different times, is a message to have people get along. As we say in the Church Of Doug: Love unconditionally. Encourage diversity. Be a humble servant. Why is every religion, at its heart some variation of these three tenets?
What if God created for himself a universally large Rube Goldberg machine with a godlike number of variables, including giving people some degree of free will? Consider a second analogy: imagine the universe is like a performer spinning plates on the tops of poles. The performer is trying to keep all the plates spinning so none of them fall down. If each plate was a Rube Goldberg machine and God was trying to keep them all running as long as possible, then God would go from plate to plate to give each one of them a touch on the rims to keep them spinning... or in our case God sees cultures not behaving in a manner that keeps the world of people alive and interacting and gives that culture a nudge to remind them that they need to change their behavior to match God's message, thus keeping the universe moving. God does interact with the universe when things deviate from God's desire to see the universe continue.
Yes, we are a small piece of the universe. Our existence on this one planet of this one solar system in this one galaxy . . . and we have only been in existence for a very short period of time. Perhaps part of the reason God isn't constantly with us is because there are other issues on other planets that needs God's attention too. If God made us, then we are, to some degree, part of God's plan.
This analogy would resolve the questions of what does God want from us? Why doesn't God just reveal himself to everyone at all time? Why God doesn't seem to respond to prayers (when the odds are not in favor of it happening)... and more. I'm not saying God is a child simply playing with a toy. This universe is divinely vast with an unbelievable number of variations (yet with a small set of laws of science) that we cannot comprehend God without some degree of description by use of analogy.
