if there were a God?

[Leanne]

Interestingly, assuming my definition (God is a supreme being who alone subsists of himself and is infinite in all perfections, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent) is what we are discussing, it flows from that, that there can be no limitations on God's possibilities or activities, save those which are impossible by reason of being contradictions in terms -- like a round square. Thus, he could arrange matters exactly to fit those who suppose that physics proves his non-existence; or he could be the man with a long white beard (which reminds me, must go to the barber before I get more God-like); and as for ensuring that everyone recognised him upon some second coming, well, that would surely be a piece of piss!

Ten to one my ignorant spell-check will argue about 'subsist', as it did earlier about 'volte-face'-- can't someone make a grown-up one?

I can't help with the spell-check conundrum... some mysteries are not meant to be solved... but a round square is only an impossibility if you adhere to the laws of our universe, and presumably God has lots of geometric anomalies in his pockets. Personally I'm happy enough to think of the big bloke upstairs as the ultimate scientist (or omniscientist), which would make us a kind of cosmic petrie dish (and thus explain many things, including Whitney Houston). It's quite a pantheistic view, but it's not illogical to think that if certain folks can only think of the universe in terms of science, then science is what the universe will give them -- just as the Norse quite liked their universe to be made up of men with large thighs and ginger beards, and the Greeks seemed to have an obsession with semi-naked deities and bestiality.