[Editor's note: Our welcome "sceptical theist" contributor invites responses. Here's mine.
Many of us in Sea of Faith see the old arguments for and against the existence of an objective god as the good old knock-about stuff of the past. What seems more important at the end of the twentieth century and second Common Era millenium is not whether gods "exist" but a more fundamental question: Whatever 'God' meant to past generations who produced the stories about 'him', what, if anything, does 'God' mean to us today? Acknowledging as we do that all religious traditions (and therefore, surely, all gods) are human creations, what is there in these traditions, products of the past, which can still speak to our condition, still lift the human spirit and inspire a passionate and compassionate zeal for a better world - which is what some of us understand by religion?
Some will choose to stay with, or feel unable to break from, a model based on an objective God, 'someone' or 'something' 'ultimately' independent of human consciousness (perhaps because they feel the universe must have had a 'creator'). Others will find that model unserviceable (who or what created the creator?), perhaps preferring the William Blake model where "all gods reside in the human breast". Others again will prefer a model which has no place for God or gods except as fabled characters in the old, old stories. (Others, of course, couldn't care a toss). Whichever model we choose for ourselves, we do well to remember that all are human creations, all are provisional, and only by their fruits shall we know them.]