My brother (call him Carl) is visiting for xmas (I am currently living at home with my family). Carl was a philosophy and physics major in college. He is also very intelligent. My family tends not to talk about too much "controversial" stuff if they can help it. Before the conversation gets very far we usually change the subject.
I forget how it came up, but today Carl was talking to my dad about the existence of god. Carl believes in a god, but he has a different definition of god than most. He said something like this: "After we have found the 'unified theory of everything' that explains how everything is, we still won't know why anything is, and that is god." He explained that we could not understand god. He said god was not separate from anything else, like many people say. He also equated god with "the force."
Well nobody in the room was really saying very much about this, and I was not engaged in the conversation. But then I asked him why god exists, and he replied "That is a stupid question- god is not some guy." I believe we changed the subject at this point. I wish we didn't do this, and I wish I had more courage to speak my mind, or at least express my curiosity about what he is saying a little. But I am working on this.
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone has ever experienced a similar argument about god, and if so what your thoughts are.
See, when I say I'm an atheist, it's because I think I can disprove god. That is, god as it is usually defined. But you can never disprove all of the definitions of god, because someone could just define god as their cat, and it exists. Has anyone encountered a different definition of god that they found hard to disprove?