Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) by Jerry A. Coyne Page A

that require some kind of evidence—and although they can be hard to test depending on the kind of god you worship, advocates of theism argue that God’s interventions in the universe should be detectable. At the very least, those theists should be able to describe what the world would be like had it arisen in a purely naturalistic manner, and if their god didn’t exist.
    Many surveys show that belief in gods is universal and strong. A 2011 survey of belief in twenty-two countries, for instance, found that 45 percent of all people asked agreed with the statement “I definitely believe in a God or a Supreme Being.” But there was wide variation among nations, ranging from 93 percent agreement in Indonesia to only 4 percent in Japan. (Besides Turkey and Indonesia, “Muslim countries” weren’t surveyed, nor were any in Africa, though belief in both regions is surely very high.) European countries were on the low side, with between 20 percent and 30 percent of people being “definite” believers, with Great Britain coming in at 25 percent. The United States, the most religious of First World countries, ranked seventh, with 70 percent espousing definite belief in God. (Definite
nonbelief,
by the way, was expressed by 18 percent of Americans—about half the level found in France, Sweden, and Belgium.)
    God, of course, can be construed along a continuum from the traditional bearded man in the sky to the ineffable “ground of being” of modern theologians. But three surveys conducted by the International Social Survey Program between 1991 and 2008 narrowed this down, asking people in thirty countries whether they believed in a
personal
god
“who concerns himself with every human being personally.” This goes further than just assuming that God affects the world. But the results resembled those given above: there was wide variation, ranging from 20 to 30 percent in most European countries to 68 percent in the United States, but there was also widespread acceptance, in studies spanning two decades, of an involved and intervening God. Clearly most of those who accept God are theists, not deists.
    Right before I wrote these paragraphs, a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses e-mailed me an article, “ The Untold Story of Creation ,” which was quite specific about God’s nature:
    God is a person, an individual. He is not a vague force devoid of personality, floating aimlessly in the universe. He has thoughts, feelings, and goals.
    The more intellectual believers would sneer at such a description, claiming that God is not at all like a person, and that their own nebulous and impersonal deity is the “correct” description of God. (How they know this is never specified.) But that’s not the take of the many highly respected and nonliteralist theologians who still imbue God with personlike qualities. The list of God’s attributes from
The National Catholic Almanac
reads like a dictionary definition:
    Attributes of God . Though God is one and simple, we form a better idea by applying characteristics to Him, such as: almighty, eternal, holy, immortal, immense, immutable, incomprehensible, ineffable, infinite, intelligent, invisible, just, loving, merciful, most high, most wise, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, patient, perfect, provident, self-dependent, supreme, true.
    Here’s how Richard Swinburne sees God:
    I take the proposition “God exists” (and the equivalent proposition “There is a God”) to be logically equivalent to “there exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things.” I use “God” as the name of the person picked out by this description.
    Alvin Plantinga is America’s equivalent to Swinburne: a respected philosopher/theologian, once regional president of the American