Reading the posts on here and in general debates the default assumption is that when we speak about God we are talking about the Christian God. These conversations are interesting and engaging but they don’t properly belong to the philosophy of religion, rather, these conversations are theology. Oftentimes conversations will be heading in an interesting direction or seem to resolve when someone will cite scripture or some theological tradition and derail the conversation into Christian specific theology while leaving the philosophical question unanswered.

Certainly, ‘Does God exist?” and “Does the Christian God exist?” are related conversations, but if we accept certain truths from Christianity we muddle our rationality with predetermined opinions and rules. For example, God must be omnibenevolent if he is the Christian God. The problem of suffering and evil is completely different if we are talking about God than if we are talking about the Christian God.

And the assumption that God would be Christian is just too bold for one forum post. It’s one thing to believe in God, that’s easy enough, but to think that we could know that this religion about God is the correct one seems to be beyond our reckoning.

We should think about God as some plain Greatest Conceivable Being. Leave out all the theology that comes later if we can even say that Christianity is true. When we talk about God we should be able to conceive of a boundless being beyond our restrictions, so that the logical and rational implications of such a God may be realized.

A rough outline of my thinking might go:

If we are going to talk about God then we should speak without hindrances
Speaking about any one religion’s god limits more than it adds to the discourse
We should talk about God without attaching God any one religion.

I don’t want to say that Christianity or other religions don’t add anything, I just think that they move us away from clear philosophy and towards theology.